Chapter 7
It feels disingenuous to say that the main problem is that previously unnamed asshole now has a name, but in fairness to me?—
Malcolm Walsh having a name is the main problem.
Everything else is perfect.
Except for Mason being the most Protective Dad he’s been since our parents died, and except for the increased security at his building, and except for the fact that everybody’s watching me to see if I have a breakdown.
I’m not going to have a breakdown.
I’m the farthest from having a breakdown that I’ve ever been, because my schedule is packed.
I start each day by kissing my wife’s temple and whispering good morning, angel. I bring her tea that’s basically tan in a mug that was a wedding gift from Mason. It’s like my red Mickey mug, except it has Mickey and Minnie getting married on it, and the background is a classy diamond pattern in ivory. He also got Gabriel a mug as a wedding gift. For my wedding. So maybe I’m not the only one having a breakdown. Gabriel’s new mug has a red Hot Wheels car on it, complete with a neon Hot Wheels banner. Gabriel laughs the same way every morning when he sees the mug, like it’s the most delightful thing ever to grace his life aside from his fiancée. Half the time, he also shows Elise, and she oohs and aahs over it like it’s brand new.
“Are you in love with me?” Lily asks every morning without fail when she sees her mug in my hand.
“I’m so in love with you that we’re married,” I tell her.
She acts surprised until she falls into the pillows and laughs, and I climb into bed with her and pretend we’re on a honeymoon.
We are on a honeymoon.
This is a honeymoon, where everyone is happy all the time and neither person can think about anything but how happy they are.
I’m so happy that I go back to the office and pick up my promotion like I didn’t abandon it to kidnap a woman and fall in love with her and have two short stints in jail and get married and almost lose my fucking mind on my wedding day.
My assistant, Kirk, is extremely happy to show me the ropes all over again. I’m pretty sure he’s been doing my job the whole time I was gone.
“You’re working hard,” Dev says on my third day back, leaning in my door frame. Kirk is picking up some copies for me.
“I’m a hard worker. Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“I—” Dev stops himself and flicks his eyes up to the ceiling. “Nice try, slugger.”
“Oooh, slugger. If I let you call me that all the time, will you tell me one single fact about your life outside this office?”
“I don’t like egg rolls,” he says, then disappears down the hall before I can tell him that I already knew about his egg roll thing. He’s eaten dinner at the office and at Mason’s too many times for me to be unaware that Dev does not care for egg rolls.
It’s good to build rapport. And, anyway, I don’t want him to notice that I’m not working hard on anything for Phoenix.
I’m going through all the business records I can get my hands on to see if Phoenix has ever worked with any company that might have ties to someone using the name Malcolm Walsh.
When that turns up nothing, I have one of the interns scan all the paperwork from the box in my closet.
I find a few invoices for decent sums of money, but they’re all paid to shell companies.
Next, I move on to the records from the consortium itself. We got our hands on more of it when Elise’s father died, but silly me—I thought there was no rush.
There’s sure as hell a rush now.
I want Malcolm Walsh dead.
The thought isin my head every second of the day and most of the night.
Upsetting? Of course it’s upsetting. I haven’t had this many thoughts about killing a person ever.
I’ve had thoughts about people dying. Dreams about people dying. But never because I took the initiative to kill them.
That started on my wedding day.
Funny, isn’t it? I’ve spent more than half my life being a human crime scene, and in all that time, I never thought about murder. I thought about freeing pigs being used as science experiments and imprisoned chickens and a tiny little bird who looked like a snowball. I never brought a gun with me. I never thought of my hands as weapons.
I’ve stopped in the kitchen to hang out with Snowball while Remy picks the Downton episode.
“What do you think? Are my hands weapons?”
Snowball cocks his head at me. Are you cracking up?
“Probably.”
Do you even still like me?
“Of course I like you. Are you mad that I’m spending so much time banging Lily?”
Snowball tweets like an alarm clock.
“Okay, fuck, fine. I’ll get up earlier so I can catch you up on the previous day’s bang sessions, if that’s what you need.”
Gross.
“She is not gross.” Snowball flutters his wings. “But all I can think about is how close that guy’s lapels were to his throat. I could have choked him to death.”
GROSS.
“I know.”
You are talking to a bird!
“I know that, too.”
These are not the hands of a killer!
Well, no. Not yet. And if they were, that guy…might not have deserved it. It’s tough to think of him as any kind of victim. It’s tough to picture his corpse as a victim.
Zeus would say that this was troublesome. Most of the time, he and his brothers talk like everybody else, but sometimes those guys sound like they walked out of a different decade. Like they learned English from somebody who had clawed his way into the bourgeoisie but wasn’t born there, so it’s not quite right.
I’m not being judgemental. I’m sure my family sounds weird to people who aren’t in it, with Gabriel’s singing and Mason’s relentless confidence and Remy constantly talking about dirt.
And me, being the class fucking clown.
See? This is all a joke. A bit of fun to pass the time, or whatever.
In a way,I am turning over a new leaf. I’m a married man with a pregnant wife. Anybody would settle down under those circumstances.
In my case, I don’t think it’s possible to settle down, just like it’s never been possible to keep my mind from wandering in class or stay focused during long meetings. I’m at the mercy of whatever my brain finds interesting. If I’m lucky, those things will coincide with a degree program, and then I look like an educated criminal instead of a bored one.
There’s a lot about this that’s really, too. I love Lily with every heartbeat. I genuinely can’t get enough of the way she looks at me when I wake her up, a mug of tea already in my hand. My favorite part of the day is curling up in bed with her. Knowing that she’s going to be at Mason’s when we get home is one of the nicest sensations I’ve ever experienced.
But there’s a split in the middle of my brain, and on the other side of all that happiness…
I’m terrified.
I’ve been terrified for a long time. The only thing worse than losing my parents was the threat of losing all my siblings along with them. Having Lily—here, alive, in love with me—is like trying to breathe in air that’s on fire.
If I lost her, I wouldn’t make it.
If my family lost me, they’d have each other. They’d only have lost the least of them. And in the end, if the truth came out—how much of a criminal I really was, how uncontrollable I’d been—it would soften the blow. It wouldn’t be like losing our mom or our dad. It wouldn’t be like losing Mason.
Things would be easier.
That soundslike I want to die, but I don’t.
What I want to do, more than anything, is keep Lily safe.
Lily is never going to be safe until Malcolm Walsh is dead.
And until Malcolm Walsh is dead, it’s between the two of us. If anything happens to Lily, it’s over for me.
I’ve donethis routine a million times. Go to school—now it’s work, with Mason and Gabriel—and spend half my day scouring paperwork for leads. Come home—still home, with Gabriel and Elise and Nate and Lydia living in the guest apartment for safety reasons—and tease Remy and make out with Lily and hold Robin and tell jokes to make Sunshine laugh and annoy the shit out of my brother.
Wait for everyone to fall asleep.
Keep working on paperwork.
The business records aren’t infinite, and it’s not very long until I reach the end. Eight days, I think. Not much longer than a week.
I haven’t found Malcolm Walsh, but I’ve found several shell companies to chase down and a group of people I didn’t expect. Not another consortium. A ring around the consortium, like the rings around Saturn. These people are nothing by themselves. They weren’t victims of the consortium. The opposite, actually. They made plenty of money by staying close, but not too close.
I start paying them visits.
It’sthe time of year when we all start to feel it—the inevitable drag of the anniversary. Before Charlotte, Mason would either work too hard as the summer burned through the city or he’d start phoning it in, leaving most of the day-to-day at Phoenix to Dev. Before Elise, Gabriel kept his schedule packed. He was somewhere different every night. I did my best to be there for Remy. I don’t know if she feels it less than Gabriel and Mason and I because she was so young when they died or if she’s just good at pretending, but usually she seems fine. Hangs out with her friends. Comes home and studies more archeology stuff. Sits out by the pool with big sunglasses on and reads books that make her gasp and fan herself.
I did my best to be there for Remy, but that’s easy when your baby sister is a normal human who sleeps only slightly less than the rest of humanity. I still had lots of time to do my crime scene stuff.
The more things change, the more things stay the same, am I right?
That heavy, half-drowned feeling in my chest only gets heavier as the anniversary gets closer. There’s a lot of bullshit grief advice out there, but one thing that does take my mind off it is staying busy, so I stay busy.
It gets harder and harder to breathe, but I stay busy.
“There was a second guy,”Lily says dreamily. It’s the middle of the night. She seemed restless, so I decided not to sneak out. “At the warehouse.”
“In your dream?”
“No. In real life.”
Okay. She’s awake. Lily sits up and cuddles close to me. My heart wants to climb out of my chest and cover her like a shield so nothing can touch her again.
“A second kidnapper?”
“No. Like a—a Good Samaritan.”
That raises my fucking hackles. Why?
Because of Remy.
Because of the guy who saved her at study group. From the prick who gave her cigarette burns. You don’t have to worry about the Good Samaritan guy.
“Did you?—”
“I didn’t get his name, no,” Lily says. “Light hair. Gray eyes. Tallish. He snuck in?—”
“How did he sneak into an empty room?”
“Hallway.” She yawns. “And he, like, distracted the kidnapper—Walsh—with a penny. He threw it so it made a noise, and then he hit him over the head with a lead pipe.”
“Are you sure this isn’t a dream about Clue?”
A laugh. “It was real. But then he disappeared. I guess he didn’t want credit for saving me.”
“Maybe he’s Jesus.”
“Maybe.”
So there aretwo people I’m looking for.
Walsh, and the Good Samaritan.
Breakingand entering is different when it’s private homes. Rich assholes always have a lot of security systems. Mason doesn’t like those, because he hates the idea of having videos of himself—and all of us—on some server somewhere that he’s not in charge of, and none of us are tech geniuses, so there aren’t cameras all over the buildings.
Hades is weird about being filmed, too, so I guess it’s a plus for everyone.
It’s definitely a plus for me, because there’s no footage of me leaving the building every night. And, in my younger years—when we didn’t have the money for fancy security shit—it meant that I had to figure out how to disable those systems so I didn’t get caught every time.
People’s houses are different from corporate trespassing because people are usually home at night. It works in my favor that many of the people in the consortium’s orbit are rich enough to have detached houses with small yards or some sort of terrace entrance into a shared garden space.
Their houses are quiet while I go through filing cabinets and load digital records onto thumb drives. So quiet that I can hear them breathing.
The first time I find myself standing over someone’s bed in the main bedroom, I think, oh, I could kill them.
I’m in the house. They don’t know it. It would be the work of, what, twenty seconds?
But looking at the defenseless, middle-aged couple in the bed, I don’t want to kill them. I don’t hate them. I’m not angry. I don’t feel much of anything at all.
At first, it’s a nice break from how painfully I love Lily.
Then it’s a little?—
What would Zeus say?
Troublesome.
But I’m busy, so I keep going.
I do a little corporate breaking and entering for the shell companies, then switch back to private homes.
I start to lose time.
A little bit, here and there. Not surprising, given that we’re not far out from the anniversary. Not surprising, given that my brain feels like it might fall into two separate halves at any second.
I’m thinking about a silver wedding ring in a pile of ash when I realize somebody’s looking at me.
It’s the woman in the bed. Her husband is on a business trip. His flight schedule was on the fridge, held there with a magnet in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. This lady can’t be more than sixty.
She lies absolutely still. Her wide eyes are mostly whites, and she breathes so shallowly that she could be a statue. Oh, she’s scared.
I put my finger over my lips in the universal sign for shh and leave, her husband’s records on the jump drive in my pocket.
I don’t own a gun.
I’m going through a home office in an empty apartment—very empty, since these people are spending the summer in the Hamptons—a gun safe in the corner of the room, when I remember I don’t have one.
Someday, I’m going to find Malcolm Walsh, and I’m going to kill him.
It still doesn’t feel good to think about that. To think about being a killer.
Is it the gun thing I don’t like?
Maybe a knife would be better.
Yeah. A knife seems better. I need more options than just my bare hands.
Jamie, my mom says.
“Don’t worry about it.” I jiggle the mouse on the office’s desktop computer. People are so lazy about passwords on these. “Trust me, Mom. Everything’s going to be fine.”
It doesn’t feel good to you.
“Well, no, but letting him kill Lily doesn’t feel good, either.
Did you tell your brothers and sister yet?
“Tell them what?”
To call you by the name I gave you.
“They call me Jameson every single day. You gave me that name, too. I haven’t given up on you. You’re going to see, once I’m done. You’ll see how safe Lily is.”
Jamie.
“Please, Mom.”
She’s quiet.
“Did he say anything?”
“Who?” Water from the shower runs down over Lily’s face, catching in her eyelashes like a summer rainstorm.
“The Good Samaritan.”
“Not a word.” She purses her lips. “So quiet.”
“Did Walsh say anything?”
Lily leans closer, her breasts pressing against my ribs. “I had to keep him talking for a little while. I asked him how long he’d been doing this for a job.”
“Yeah?”
“He said fourteen or fifteen years.”
I’ll have betterluck finding Walsh on the street.
Jamie.
“Mom.”
You have to stop.
“I have to keep going.”
I won’t think less of you.
“We’ve had this conversation before.”
It’s warm in Morris Heights. The summer heat hangs over all the concrete. Wind moves in huge gusts that come down to the street in irregular patterns. At least there’s a breeze in my hair. It’s too hot to cool me down, but it exists.
I won’t think any less of you. That’s still true. How do you like being married?
“I love being married.” It hurts. Why does love have to hurt? Seems like it shouldn’t. “I love her so fucking much.”
You could rest with her.
“I can’t. That’s the thing.” I don’t remember the last time I slept for more than twenty minutes. Probably when I had those painkillers. “I can’t sleep, and it feels like I’m going to burst out of my skin. It’s better if I keep moving. Because, Mom, fourteen or fifteen years—that’s you. That’s you and Dad and Mason. There’s no way he wasn’t the one.”
You need to rest.
“I’m looking for something, Mom. This is restful.”
What I’m looking for is an apartment building. It’s a narrow one. Rent-controlled units. No elevator. If we’d lived here after my parents died, Gabriel and I would have had to carry Mason up the stairs every night. I cross the street and push one of the buttons on the buzzer.
“Yeah?” a woman’s voice says.
“Pizza.”
She buzzes me in.
Not a safe thing to do! But I’m not going to hurt her. I just climb the stairs until I find the door to the rooftop, walk to the edge, and sit down.
From here, I can see in the windows of the building across the street.
Half an hour later, a man comes down the sidewalk in a blue hoodie and a pair of khaki shorts. He has the hood up despite the heat and doesn’t hesitate when he reaches the building.
I don’t have a firm handle on which unit he might be living in, but that’s why I’m here. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty. Or your jeans dirty. The building’s ledge is covered in dust.
A minute later, one of the windows on the second-highest floor lights up.
The man comes back into view, flipping his hood back as he digs his phone out of his pocket.
Light hair.
He looks at the screen for a few minutes, then picks his head up and peers at the building.
And then his eyes lift.
And lift again.
Until they meet mine.
I don’t look away. I don’t care if he sees me. What’s he going to see, anyway? A guy sitting on the roof? I’m nobody to him.
I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think his eyes were gray.
When I go backthe next night, the apartment stays dark.
I thinkMason’s happy that I’m coming home every night and going to work every day. He seems relaxed, and I like that. I really do.
“Married life suits you,” Remy says one day a couple weeks out from the anniversary. We’re in the living room with an episode of Downton Abbey. Mason’s chef made absurdly huge bowls of popcorn with little candies inside. Mason and Charlotte are curled up on the couch. Robin’s asleep on Mason’s chest. Gabriel and Elise are sprawled throughout the living room.
“Maybe I should’ve gotten married sooner.”
Remy shakes her head. “It had to be Lily.”
Lily comes into the room then in a pair of my sweatpants and one of my long-sleeved shirts.
“I know I’m not actually showing.” She drops down next to me and curls up at my side. “But your clothes are so comfortable.”
“I hear that happens when it’s the father of your child,” Remy says.
Lily blushes all the way to her hair. “You’re teasing.”
“Yeah,” Remy laughs. “I am. But Jameson does have comfortable clothes.”
Jamie, I almost say. Remember when you used to call me Jamie? But there’s no way to explain that. Listen, I know I’ve insisted on being called Jameson since you were seven, but I changed my mind. I had a talk with Mom about it, and she thinks it would be better if I told all of you I’m going insane.
That would ruin Downton Abbey night. It might even ruin popcorn with candy in it, depending on how badly my siblings took the news.
Jamie, my mom says, mildly scolding.
“I do have comfortable clothes. The fucking best.”
“Jameson, shh. Mr. Carson is about to solve the big problem and pour the wine,” Remy whispers.
“He’s doing a hell of a job.”
In moments like this,when there’s a giant bowl of buttered popcorn on my lap and Lily at my side and Remy being genuinely proud of a fictional butler named Mr. Carson, it almost feels real.
Being fine, I mean. For a few seconds at a time, I feel like I could keep the mask on forever. Let the crime scene part of me die a quiet, unremarkable death.
Three hours later, I step into the night.
Being fine is a fantasy. Hopes and dreams are bullshit.
Killing a guy? That could come true.