Chapter Eleven
Eleven
I tumbled out of the closet as Dominic sat up in his bed. “I was wondering when you were going to come out.”
“What the fuck?” I said, tripping over a towel balled up on the floor.
“What the fuck yourself?” He reached over to turn on a bedside lamp.
I was totally busted and had no excuse. “How did you— Why didn’t you meet me?” I rubbed at my forehead, hoping my brain would think of something smart to say.
“I saw you,” he said. “I came back for a coat and saw you snooping around.”
“So you just decided to mess with me?” I asked, somehow feeling justified to be pissed off.
He climbed out of the bed and walked toward me.
“You’re clearly crazy,” he said, stopping in front of me and crossing his arms. “So what kind of crazy are you?”
“Screw you. I did this to see if you were a psycho.”
“And?”
“And I’m going to go,” I said, turning away from him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” He grabbed my arm and I basically hissed at his fingers gripping my bicep.
He pulled his hand back and tucked it under his other arm.
I read it as an offer to keep his hands to himself going forward.
He would be smart to realize that was what was best for him.
“I think we should talk,” he said. “Or I could call the cops. You did break into my apartment.”
We sat together on his leather couch, leaning against opposite arms so that we could face each other. He had found a shirt and he tugged at his hair, 1-2-3.
“I’m not really sure what to say,” he said.
“You seem…excited,” I said. “Are you getting off on this or something?”
“I am. Kind of,” he admitted. “Not in a sexual way or anything, but I’ve never had a stalker before.”
“I’m not stalking you. You can relax.”
“Are you dangerous?” he asked.
“Oh my God, stop. Seriously. I get this looks bad, but you aren’t going to be able to tick off any of your weird fetish boxes with me.”
“Any of my weird fetish boxes?! You broke into my apartment, probably trying to steal my underwear.”
“No one wants your nasty baggy boxers. You look like you’re twelve years old,” I spat back.
He glanced down, seemingly affected by my observation, but shook it off, remembering he had the upper hand in the situation. He sighed and tugged his hair again, 1-2-3. “Tell me why you broke in, then.”
“I wanted to see how obsessed you are with Abel Haggerty. I wanted to see if you were hiding anything.” I was probably acting too casual for break-in behavior, especially if this guy was not playing the game I was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was in a bad relationship once. It’s made me paranoid, and probably a little impulsive. ”
He processed that before asking, “Are you afraid of me?”
I think he wanted the answer to be yes, but it was most certainly a no. I shook my head. “Are you afraid of me?”
“Should I be?” He tilted his head and gave me a little smile.
A silence took over that wasn’t necessarily awkward, but it wasn’t comfortable. My wheels were turning and so were his. He bit his lip and squinted at me, tentative to say something, but he got over it. “Have you ever seen a dead body?”
“No,” I lied. Holy shit, was he about to pull out the rest of Oswald Shields’s body from under the bed or something?
“Sometimes I go to the morgue,” he explained.
“Why?” I asked, a bit disgusted—not because I thought it was disgusting that he went to the morgue but because that was his big bad-boy admission after I had already hyped him up in my head to be a murderer with the dead body of a man I knew under his bed.
“I do it to remind myself what it really is that Abel’s talking about. It’s different from hearing words or seeing pictures. When there’s a dead body in front of you, it’s real.”
I could see how this would sound deep to someone else, but I had seen a lot of dead bodies and knew you didn’t have to be so emo about it. “Do you want to be like him?” I asked. “Is that what this is about?”
“A killer? No.” He shook his head, not offended. “I just…It feels like there’s a key to life and death, and if I can figure it out, I can transcend it.”
Oh God, his book was going to be awful. Just write the facts with digestible prose, Dostoevsky was what I wanted to say.
“I think you’re romanticizing” was what I said instead.
“I don’t think it’s about transcending. I think it’s about accepting.
A person is only a thing and there are lots of things.
In your own head, you think you are the shiniest, most unique thing out there, but you’re not.
Once you can understand that you’re just another thing on this planet, you can accept it and it frees you. ”
He exhaled a little noise that said wow without actually having to say wow. “That’s sad. Even if you’re right, that’s depressing. Do you really think like that? Do you think you’re free?”
“I hope so,” I said, knowing I wasn’t free. I’d been in hiding since I was nine years old. I existed in a cage with a long list of rules. When I thought about it, it bummed me out. Stupid Dominic, making me think about these things. This was why I only dated Brians.
He was staring at me.
“What?” I asked.
He leaned across the couch and touched my cheek.
He waited to see if I would hiss at him again, and when I didn’t, he kissed me.
I wasn’t expecting the transition, but I went with it.
So much for it not being sexual. It felt nice to be kissed by someone who was kind of a freak and who was attracted to the fact that I was probably one too.
He had no idea though, really. He was hoping for the crazy ex-girlfriend type, but my crazy was way too severe to ever revolve around him.
I couldn’t let myself pretend it was anything else.
I couldn’t let anything cloud the serious mess I was in and how I was going to get out of it.
I pushed him back enough to part our lips.
He sighed, biting his lip as he retreated, coming across more apologetic than disappointed. “Can I show you something?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, knowing better this time than to hope it was going to be a dead body.
- - - - -
“Have you heard about those arms they found?” Dominic asked as he brought his laptop back to the couch.
“No.”
“They found a severed arm in the mail in Jamaica Plain and then a couple days ago they found another one near Northeastern. The second one was James Calhoun. Do you know who that is?”
“No.”
He turned his laptop to show me a twenty-year-old picture of James from some newspaper article covering the arrest of my father. “He was the detective who caught Abel Haggerty.” He waited for my reaction, but I wasn’t ready to say anything.
“I know, it doesn’t mean anything. This guy worked on hundreds of cases, but get this…” He turned the computer back around. “The other arm belongs to a man named Oswald Shields.”
“And there’s a connection?” My ignorance was easily digestible; Dominic was hungry to flex his knowledge of the situation.
“There is, but no one seems to have figured it out. Other than me, I mean.” He grinned.
“Oswald Shields was a lawyer—well, he used to be. He was disbarred around 2009 for falsifying some documents. Anyway, I went to Abel after they identified James Calhoun’s arm and asked him if he’d ever heard of Oswald Shields and guess what?
Oswald Shields had visited him while he was awaiting trial. ”
“Why?”
“Turns out Abel was working with James Calhoun to hide the kid, and Oswald was the lawyer Calhoun involved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember I told you Abel and Reanne had a daughter? Marin? From the picture?”
“I remember.”
“Abel wanted her buried.” He shook his head “That was a poor choice of words. He didn’t want the kid to be labeled a freak, you know, the daughter of notorious serial killers.
So he begged Calhoun to help. Abel and Reanne signed away their parental rights.
There’s been no mention of Marin Haggerty since. They changed her name.”
“To what?” I managed to ask without screaming.
“No idea. Calhoun refused to tell Abel. That was part of the deal. Abel tried a few times over the years to write to Oswald Shields, knowing he was a piece of shit who’d probably tell him, but the guy never responded.”
Was this possible? I’d never thought much about the logistics.
At the time I was nine. I did what I was told.
I was keeping enough secrets; I couldn’t worry about if other people were too.
Would my father sign away his rights so easily?
I’d always assumed he didn’t have a choice.
I guess I was a witness. I knew everything.
Was it love or liability or some combination of both?
“And he just told you all of this?” I pressed Dominic.
“His entire gospel is his ability to read a person, and he knows he can trust me.”
Ugh, his gospel. That’s a way to put it.
He never said God. Any ties to organized religion would dilute my father’s perceived power.
He liked to say beings, which was ridiculous; it sounded like aliens.
That was why my father had to kill. He was told to kill those people, because way worse things would happen if he didn’t.
He insisted the signs would come to me too someday, but I had to be careful because I could be tricked.
In his mind, after the Abbingtons, he was proven right.
That was where the X’s came in, carved down my side.
They were small but deep, and somewhere in his twisted brain they would prevent impostors from getting into my head again.
An insane logic from an insane man and I think just an excuse to permanently label my body as his, as if having his genes wasn’t enough.
I knew what my father was doing with Dominic.
He was telling him that he was the one Dominic was supposed to communicate with, only him, and that probably made Dominic rock-hard and dangerously loyal.
If my father was orchestrating this business with the arms and the bloody messages, Dominic would be the one whose strings were being pulled.
“What about the police? Have they made the connection?” I asked.
“Far as I can tell, no. I mean, they assume two severed arms are connected, but I haven’t seen anything that shows they’ve put it together.
There’s no obvious connection between Abel and Oswald Shields.
You’d have to really know what you’re looking for.
The name wouldn’t be in Abel’s file—maybe the kid’s, but those records are sealed.
Don’t tell me you think I should tell them. I can’t do it. I swore to Abel.”
“I don’t think you should tell them. What’s the fun in that?” I smiled, playing into his fantasies, motivated by self-preservation. The longer it took for the police and the media to focus in on my father, the better.
“Do you want to know what I think?” He paused rhetorically; I wasn’t supposed to guess. It was for suspense. “I think Marin Haggerty is back.”