10 #2
Jem moved down a short hall and checked a door. “Basement,” he said. “And then back to the kitchen.”
Tean nodded.
“Up or down?” Jem asked.
“Down, I guess. His father’s not in any of the pictures. His biological father, I mean.”
“Huh.”
“I don’t know if it means anything. I just noticed.”
Jem nodded and started down the stairs.
It was not a torture dungeon. It was, instead, a nicely finished basement: a second family room with an oversized sofa and a massive TV, another full bathroom, and a room that probably couldn’t legally be called a bedroom, but had a bed and dresser and frilly curtains in the windows.
Otherwise, the décor tended toward the masculine: foosball table, vintage fishing posters, Uintah High pennants over the couch.
Someone had left a Diet Coke on the coffee table, and a wedge of lime was still stuck on the rim of the can.
A small utility room also doubled as storage, with a few plastic shelves, the kind you could get at Home Depot and assemble yourself, against one wall.
They didn’t hold anything more interesting than extra toilet paper and cleaning supplies.
“Upstairs?” Tean said.
Jem nodded, but his face was dark.
“What?” Tean asked.
“This is such a bummer. Total waste of a basement.”
“Well, I know this was disappointing, but maybe next time it will be a torture dungeon.”
“You always say that.”
It was the kind of conversation that, Tean had learned, you just had to roll with, even if it didn’t make any sense—mostly because it made Jem happy. And he caught himself smiling as they made their way up again.
In the foyer, Jem stopped and considered the stairs going up. “Where she fell?”
“Or going down to the basement, I suppose.”
But Jem shook his head. “No, it was here.” He pointed to the landing, where a dent in the drywall was visible.
“That means she fell from the top of the stairs,” Tean said.
“It means he pushed her from the top of the stairs.”
“We don’t know that. It could have been an accident.”
Jem shrugged, but he then he ticked off on his fingers, “No rack. No iron maiden. No bloody gibbets. It’s like, why even bother?”
“Uh, there there?”
Tean even patted his shoulder.
“Thanks, babe. I know you’re trying, but I’m just going to be super bummed for a while.” And without missing a beat, he said, “Race you to the top.”
It wasn’t much of a race, mostly because Tean didn’t run. But he did make sure to say, “Yes, you made it to the top very fast,” because Jem was clearly expecting something.
The first door they tried was some sort of home office.
The computer tower had a layer of dust on it, as did the bulky CRT monitor.
The desk itself was clear—no papers anywhere, nothing left out.
The drawers were equally uninteresting—mostly empty, with a few office supplies that Tean suspected no one had needed in some time.
A quick glance inside the wood-veneer filing cabinets revealed only the usual household paperwork—bills, mortgage statements, the title for a 2015 Mini Cooper.
There was no sign of a frantic search. No sign that someone had been desperate to remove a key piece of evidence.
The next door opened onto a bedroom, and for the first time since entering the house, Tean felt that low-grade rush of—not excitement, not exactly.
But it was like an electric charge, like everything inside him was powered up and on and ready to go.
Because this, he knew as soon as they looked, was Kai’s childhood bedroom.
A twin bed with a plaid coverlet. A dresser.
A desk with books lined up on top of it.
Posters on the walls—a classic ad for a Ford pickup, the Utah Jazz, different species of dinosaurs done in bright colors.
One poster was tacked to the ceiling, where Kai would have been able to look at it while lying in bed: a cowboy trying to stay on a horse mid-buck.
The photographer had done an excellent job capturing the moment: the wild energy of the horse twisting and kicking, the cowboy’s struggle to stay mounted, the tension as he locked his legs around the horse.
His body was bent back as he balanced himself in that frozen moment, and the pose made his shirt ride up to expose his flat stomach.
He had the purposefully rough look that Tean had seen on men in related professions: under the cowboy hat, the greased-back hair that curled at his nape, the patchy stubble, the deep tan.
Attractive in a rugged, stereotypically masculine way.
“Should I be getting jealous?” Jem asked as he opened a dresser drawer.
“It’s on the ceiling,” Tean said.
“So he can spank his monkey to it,” Jem said.
Tean raised his eyebrows.
“Uh, why else would you put a hot dude where you can stare at him in bed?”
“Maybe he wanted to be a cowboy.”
Jem actually laughed out loud at that.
Tean drifted over to the desk, but his gaze moved back to the poster again. “Do you think Kai is gay?”
“Duh.” But then Jem grinned in Tean’s direction. “I mean, all signs point to yes.”
“Because he was so involved in theater.”
“And because he hates gay guys. That’s your classic closeted gay guy—taking it out on a guy who’s even gayer than you so that nobody will realize you’re queer too.”
“Can someone be gayer than someone else?”
“Yes.” And when Tean’s eyebrows went up again, Jem explained, “Cher.”
“What?”
“Oh! And DP.”
Tean actually felt his eyes get wider.
“There’s gay,” Jem said, “and then there’s sticking two wieners in one bun. That’s the next level.”
“That might actually be homophobic.”
“No way! If that’s your thing, great. I’m just saying, have you ever seen somebody try to fit both feet into a single sock before? That’s dedication.”
“We have to stop talking right now,” Tean said.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe Jem was smiling as he continued the search.
There was nothing of interest in the desk—papers that looked like they might have dated back to Kai’s time in high school, a few loose pencils, a handful of coins and gum and receipts, like Kai had emptied his pockets one night.
The books on top of the desk were even less interesting—a set of Mormon scriptures, a dictionary, and a copy of Redwall that looked untouched.
Tean flipped through the books, but aside from the usual highlighting that you could find in most Mormon scriptures, there was nothing interesting.
“That scripture verse,” Tean said. “Remember? Zeb’s tattoo?”
Jem was testing the baseboard. “I remember he had a tattoo.”
“Tess told us that Kai talked to Zeb, and that’s why Zeb got the tattoo. It was a verse from the Book of Mormon.”
“Okay. We figured he was raised Mormon.”
“But it’s strange. Does he consider himself a member of the church? Does he believe what the church teaches?”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. But it’s unusual.”
“He’s gay, and he’s religious. He wants to kill other gay dudes. That’s not exactly original.”
Tean frowned. “Do you think so?”
“Tean, he’s nuts; I don’t know. I’m just spit-balling. Why don’t you go check the bathroom?”
Nodding, Tean made his way out of the room.
The bathroom was next along the landing, with white tile running across the floor and up the walls.
The mirror was only a mirror, and in the vanity’s drawers, he found more evidence that the last time Kai had lived in this house had been as a teenager: expired prescription face wash, acne wipes that had dried out, a tube of toothpaste that looked, to use a memorable phrase from Jem, like it had gotten the bad end of a five-dollar handshake.
The shower still had a bar of Dial soap and a bottle of Great Value shampoo.
The only attempt at decoration had been to hang a framed print of a desert landscape above the toilet.
“I’m checking the primary bedroom,” Tean called as he moved on. But then he stopped. Long association with Jem had taught him to be more thorough. And if there was one place a teenage boy might feel like he had some privacy, even more so than his bedroom, it would be the bathroom.
Tean tried the mirror first. It took him a couple of tries to get it off the mounting brackets, but then it slid free.
There was nothing behind the mirror, and nothing on the back of it.
He tried the framed photograph next. This one came off the wall more easily.
And behind it, a hole had been cut into the drywall.
Hole wasn’t the right word. An opening, twelve inches by twelve inches, had been made by cutting out a piece of the drywall.
Behind the drywall, the framing was visible, and then the backing of the drywall on the other side.
Tean opened his mouth to announce his discovery to Jem. Then he leaned closer.
In the drywall on the other side, another hole had been made, this one so small that it was barely visible against the paper backing.
It took two tries to line up his eyes correctly with the hole—the angle had to be just right.
And then Tean had a surprisingly good view of sunlight slanting to fall across a large bed. The primary bedroom, of course.
And then he felt sick to his stomach.
“Jem?”
A moment later, Jem was there—a dust bunny stuck to one cheek, his eyes intent.
Tean pointed at the opening.
Jem looked through the peephole and said, “The little perv liked to watch.”
Tean didn’t say anything.
“Okay,” Jem said as he stepped back from the wall. “That’s messed up.”
“That’s his parents’ bedroom.”
Tean’s phone buzzed, and it broke the moment. A message from Amy showed on the screen: Any progress?
“Is it Scipio? Tell him we’re bringing home nuggets.”
“It’s Amy,” Tean said. “And we’re not bringing Scipio home anything because I bought him an eighty-dollar bag of dog food the other day.”
Jem hung on Tean’s shoulder as he considered the phone. “Tell her we pretty much solved it.”
“But we didn’t solve it.”
“Tell her this is some Norman Bates-level shit, watching Mommy try on her new sports bra.”
“I’m not telling her any of that.”