Chapter Ten
Ten
The cops found the second arm, the one I left in the mailbox, first. No one noticed it until it was mixed in with all the other mail from the area, so they didn’t even know which mailbox it had come from.
Three days later, they made an ID. It belonged to Oswald Shields, a seventy-three-year-old former lawyer from Clinton, Massachusetts, but I already knew who Oswald Shields was.
He had been my lawyer—nineteen years ago.
Having your name changed and your identity hidden requires a lot of paperwork—and then a lot of burying of said paperwork. My memory of Oswald was spotty at best. I’d only met him once or twice and remembered that he had a gross cough that sounded very wet. He had sideburns, I think.
After my parents were arrested, I was shipped off almost immediately to a distant relative I’d never known existed. I should have been a witness in the trials, but I never told a soul that I knew what my parents were doing—that I had been a part of it all.
I was allowed to pack a bag. I remembered that part because I’d wanted to fill it with Legos, but I only got to bring one stuffed dog and had to fill the rest with clothes and underwear.
The man who made me put all the Legos back, even the microcopter that was so small it wouldn’t have made a difference, was James—Detective James Calhoun, but I just called him James because I was nine and wasn’t beholden to formalities.
He was the only other person in the world who knew me as both Marin Haggerty and Gwen Tanner.
Learning the arm belonged to Oswald Shields confirmed that the arms weren’t random props; the identities mattered. I didn’t need to wait to hear from a forensic specialist to assume the other arm belonged to James Calhoun.
- - - - -
Two days later, they announced the second arm, elevating the story from a freaky blip to a serial incident.
James Calhoun’s identity was released the following day.
Both men had still been alive when the arms were removed, and both were now missing.
There was no mention of Abel Haggerty or how the men were connected.
Even the dark bowels of the internet that had stumbled upon the story only suggested fantastical theories like mafia debts, sex cults, organ harvesting.
In the real world, it was only a local story.
One that most people would miss if they weren’t looking, but it was out there and my stalker would know that I knew.
- - - - -
Dominic and I had been texting quite a bit since the party, and that Saturday I invited him to join me at a bar downtown—then I didn’t go.
I’d gotten enough clues about where he lived from texting with him about how walkable his neighborhood was, prompting him to tell me about the coffee shop at the end of his street.
Thankfully, it wasn’t one of a million local Dunkin’ Donuts or I would still be out there looking for his place.
I spotted his tour van parked in the driveway of a converted three-story house, like mine and most of the apartment options in Boston’s outskirts.
I arrived an hour before we were supposed to meet for drinks and waited for him to leave.
The front door was closed tight and in much better shape than my own.
The mailboxes listed him and his roommate as apartment 2.
Dominic lived with another stepbrother, Kevin, but Kevin had a job implementing IT systems around the country and was always out of town.
Dominic had told me that in a way to make it seem like he basically had his own place, clearly self-conscious about it after moving out of the condo he’d shared with his fiancée.
I cut through the path between his building and the nearly identical one next to it. I had to turn sideways to slink through the tight spots caused by a broken washing machine and a couple of heavy-duty city trash cans.
Behind the house there was cheap white plastic patio furniture and a crusty firepit. I looked up to see the second- and third-floor balconies, one on top of the other. The balconies were self-enclosed and my only way up would be flying or climbing.
I yanked one of the garbage cans toward the back of the house, leaned it against the siding, and used one of the plastic chairs to climb on top.
I could barely reach the bottom of the second-floor balcony.
I sort of hopped and was able to grab two of the rail posts.
I proceeded to hang there with my feet inches above the trash.
My noodle arms and neglected abs were enough to lift my legs to about my waist, but there was no way they were getting my butt above my head.
I let go and fell back onto the trash can.
It wobbled as the top buckled slightly under my weight, and I lowered my center of gravity to balance.
I dropped to my knees and reached for the plastic chair, lifting it to my level.
I flattened myself against the vinyl siding to make room atop the trash can for the chair.
Then I did a delicate shimmy to slowly transfer my weight onto the seat.
After a couple of close calls, I was on my knees, balancing on the chair on the trash can.
Calling upon the ten squats I had done three years ago, I used my thigh muscles to slowly rise to my feet. It was enough for me to grab the crossbar of the railing and swing my leg up. The rest was easy and I flipped my body onto the balcony.
Maroon curtains were drawn over the locked sliding glass door.
What was not locked was the window to the right of the balcony.
Not enough people lock their windows. Lazy landlords slap cheap coats of paint over the window frames without making an effort to avoid the latch, and layers harden on top of each other until eventually the latch won’t budge. My father taught me that.
I leaned over and pressed my palms under the lip of the lower pane.
A few tight jabs were enough to scoot the window up.
I climbed onto the railing and slid my legs through the opening.
Once there was more of my weight inside than out, I heaved off the balcony.
It wasn’t very graceful, but it was effective.
I slithered over a radiator in the bathroom until my feet hit the floor. It was a gross guy’s bathroom, full of shaving residue, one bottle of all-in-one shampoo/body wash in the shower. There was some gel on the sink and I thought of Dominic compulsively grabbing at his hair all the time.
I walked into the living room and nothing appeared out of the ordinary—a little breakfast bar, a brown leather couch, a large flat-screen, clean other than a dirty coffee cup in the sink. No posters. Actual adults might have lived there.
The first bedroom I entered was dark and I hit the light switch.
A picture of Dominic and a lady I assumed to be his mother told me it was his room and not Kevin’s.
The espresso-brown dresser and nightstands matched the headboard in what I imagined was a hasty four-pieces-for-eight-hundred-dollars furniture deal.
There was a mismatched desk in the corner, with a stack of notebooks and his laptop.
I took a seat, and while I waited for the laptop to boot up, I grabbed a notebook.
It was full of handwritten scribbles. I opened to a page at random.
It was dated from right before Christmas.
Abel is in a good mood today. Doesn’t want to talk about any killings.
Wants to talk about the holiday. Not allowed to decorate.
How domestic. I flipped back to an earlier entry.
Elderly lady he saw in the park previous week.
She had a bad leg. Too weak to fight. He snapped her neck.
He had to do it. Came to him in a dream.
A dream. I shook my head. My father had never desired to hone his narrative à la the Boston Strangler or the Wet Bandits.
Every act, every story, every motive was different.
The only through line was that it was necessary he do it, a mission that was communicated to him—only him, the chosen one.
And someday, it would be my destiny to fulfill.
That was a familiar part of the narrative, but only to me; it was never shared with anyone.
As I skimmed through the entries, that detail appeared to be missing from these journals as well.
My father had maintained at least this boundary with Dominic.
Dominic wasn’t that special. Not special like I was.
I scanned the pages for reference to Elyse or her family. The Abbington name popped up every twenty pages or so with brief notes. He asked about Elyse again. It’s almost every time now. Getting harder to distract him.
I reached the end of my sporadic review of that notebook and went for another. It was older. Reanne won’t write back. Hasn’t written since the divorce. Regrets it. Lonely. Doesn’t get as many letters anymore. People are losing interest. Hopes the book will help.
The laptop came alive and I put the notebooks back. His computer background was my father’s mug shot. He used to be handsome, one of his assets, but one eye was slightly askew—the defect looked obvious now, but only in hindsight.
Assorted icons floated around the desktop, but in the top-right corner was a folder labeled Abel Haggerty.
I opened it, revealing even more categories—Background, Victim Profiles, Photos, et cetera.
I opened the Background folder, then a folder labeled Family, then finally one I knew would be there: Marin Haggerty.
I expected to find a treasure trove of information he shouldn’t have.
I expected pictures of me, current day, taken from the shadows: pictures at the movies photographed with night vision, pictures of me at Painting Pots taken from the parking lot through the big square windows, pictures of me in my home angled from his car below.
That was the evidence I was looking for, but there was nothing.
There were a few pictures from my old elementary school, but I’d still been chubby then, with blonde hair and round glasses.
There was a scanned report card from third grade that he’d gotten his hands on somehow, and a copy of my birth certificate.
The only thing of note was a heavily redacted document with the few remaining words being the date my parents were arrested, a lot of pronouns and prepositions, three uses of the word minor, and the name of the detective filling it out—James Calhoun.
There was a noise at the apartment door before I could think anything through. The knob was rattling. I slammed the laptop shut and flew out of the chair toward the light switch. Cut to black.
The door creaked as it opened and a light crawled across the living room. I had no chance of getting back out the bathroom window. Footsteps. I slid into the closet and closed the door, leaving it slightly ajar because I couldn’t risk the sound of it shutting.
Was someone else breaking in? This was my caper.
Maybe it was the real stalker—stalking me, stalking Dominic.
Or was it Kevin, not actually out of town?
Boring and somehow the worse option. The footsteps were almost at the bedroom.
I backed in between some hanging shirts and peered through the crack in the door.
Dominic walked into the room, pulling his sweater over his head. It wasn’t a burglar; it was this asshole standing me up for the drinks that I was standing him up for and now I was stuck in his closet.
I stood in that closet for two hours while he made something in the skillet that smelled amazing and watched the second half of the Celtics game.
Finally he got down to only his boxers, turned off the bedroom light, and climbed into bed.
I waited another half an hour until all tossing and turning subsided.
I cracked the closet door open a little farther and stuck my head out.
The whites of his eyes were all I could see in the darkness. He stared at me.