Chapter 50
ABBY
“Need to talk about it?” Robert asked when we were thirty minutes south of Fond du Lac.
It was the first thing either of us had said in an hour. I’d been thinking about what Ewan had said, thinking about why I let myself get so bothered by the fake transcript and all it alleged—and why, in comparison, my own hand in Martha’s death bothered me hardly at all.
“Abby?” Robert asked.
“Can we put on music? Just for a while. I need to think.”
“Okay,” he said, sounding hurt.
He had no idea where my thoughts were going. How could he? But I couldn’t have a normal conversation, just like I couldn’t have a normal relationship.
Martha kept talking about getting Ewan out of the house, sending him away, even before the night of the accident. She kept saying it to our father, all those nights as they sat on their grubby matching recliners and I stood in the kitchen, listening.
She wouldn’t stop. Ewan couldn’t make her stop. She would have liked that—a threat, or an actual physical act she could report. She deserved it.
It wasn’t that I did what I did, knowing it would end in death.
I just pictured her falling. One big, funny slip-on-abanana-peel whoopsie, and her coral lips pulling back into a sloppy round circle of surprise before one leg swung up and her wide rear crashed down, followed by the sound of something cracking—a shinbone, a broken arm, maybe a hip.
She’d be silenced, chastened, reminded that she drank too much at night, reminded that she slammed around the kitchen and left food out to spoil, reminded that we were part of this family, too.
We weren’t the leeches she made us out to be.
If she was in a cast, maybe I’d have to grocery shop.
Ewan could drive me. Maybe she’d decide to go to her sister’s place in Florida for a month, to heal up somewhere prettier and more comfortable.
Those were the images that swam through my head as I poured the green dishwashing detergent into the pine-scented floor cleaner and then added a few glops of vegetable oil to be sure, the way I’d done at a sleepover once, when we made Brittany’s kitchen floor into a super slide, so slippery that we fell again and again, laughing until Brittany wet her pants.
Brittany got in trouble for that. But I wouldn’t, because I’d never tell anyone.
Robert was still fussing with the radio dial when I picked up Benjamin’s phone, which I couldn’t unlock. I shoved it aside in order to stare at the long line of motor homes ahead of us and tried to get my head back in the game, figuring out where Curtis might be hiding.
This was vacation country. Motorcycles, lots of them. People going camping. Maybe Curtis would tolerate an RV, one of those enormous ones.
“I always wondered if we’d end up with a weekend place up here,” Robert said. “Would have been nice.”
I sighed. The last thing I could think about now was our relationship.
“I’m sorry. Someday, you’ll buy a nice cabin with someone else. It’ll happen.”
Under his breath he said, “I never understood why.”
“Why’d I break up with you?”
“That’s the question.”
“Boundaries.”
“But what does that mean?”
“You don’t know what boundaries are?”
“Like when you don’t want me to come over, unless I call or text first.”
“Yes.”
“But when we were going out, that made no sense. Once, I dropped by and left a note on your door and you were really happy about it. Another time, I brought you flowers—”
I groaned. “Okay, better example. When you got all up in my face about not deleting my dating apps.”
“Okay. I get that. ‘Put a ring on it,’ right?”
“No, Robert! I never wanted you to propose to me.”
His hands flew off the steering wheel. “Hey! Sorry!” A long line of Harleys continued making their way around us.
“Put your hands back. Okay, the Blue Lives Matter T-shirt you gave Benjamin.”
“That was a joke.”
“He didn’t think so.”
“Yes, he did! Your son has an ironic sense of humor. And he’s smart, Abby. Sometimes I think you forget that.”
“So you went and bought him an offensive T-shirt.”
“No. I got it from a buddy. I didn’t buy it, and I didn’t want it.
We were repainting your old apartment kitchen, remember?
And I brought over a bunch of T-shirts we could use for rags and stuff.
Benjamin saw the Blue Lives one. He thought it was hilarious.
He asked if he could have it. I said, of course!
I thought he was using it to protect his clothes from the paint.
I never thought he’d wear it to school.”
I took all that in. The Carrie Underwood song on the radio ended. Now there was a guy singing about how beer never broke his heart. “Why didn’t you ever tell me all that?”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
I turned off the radio.
“Robert, I might just be a person who can’t have a longterm relationship with anyone, for a long list of reasons.”
“So, boundaries are one.”
“And worse than crossed boundaries were the excessive gifts.”
“Gifts, bad. Not what my mama taught me, but okay.”
“Too much, too soon. You know?”
I looked over and saw his eyes were red.
“You’re a good man, Robert. Most of the time.”
He forced a laugh. “And you’re a good woman, Abby. Most of the time.”
Exactly. But I still never planned to tell him about the times I hadn’t been.
Then I thought of Benjamin, refusing to tell me about the clonidine pills.
Maybe it wasn’t so hard to understand, after all.
Maybe other people would call it guilt, but it wasn’t that simple.
You didn’t want someone to die, but you weren’t careful, either.
You did something wrong, but not as wrong as everyone will think, and you’re used to that, because no one has understood you for as long as you can remember.
You did something, but you couldn’t see how it would play out.
You want to forget, but you know you won’t.
It’s a scab you’ll keep picking at, forever.
The sign at the bottom of the vast, sloping yard said SOLD, just as Robert’s cop friend told us it would.
“The grass is recently mowed,” I pointed out, trying to sound hopeful.
We knocked on the front door and peered in the windows.
I called the realtor listed on the sign and she tried to interest me in other similar properties for sale, but when I told her I was only trying to reach Curtis Campbell, and I had one phone number for him already but he wasn’t answering, she had nothing to add.
At the last minute, the realtor said, “Is his trailer gone from the driveway? I asked him to move it.”
“I don’t see any trailer—or car.”
“Good.”
I hung up and relayed the conversation to Robert.
“You should have asked what kind of trailer she meant. Are we talking camper trailer, ATV trailer . . . ?”
I called back and got a voicemail. Crossing my arms, I looked up and down the road for anyone to talk to.
The grand houses were spaced far apart, some newer, some older.
“I just don’t see Curtis Campbell going camping or offroading.
This was a waste of time. We should have started with the nursing homes, instead. ”
In my purse, Benjamin’s phone rang once, then stopped. I just missed it.
“Someone was trying to reach him,” I said, showing Robert. I googled the area code. “Someone who lives in central Wisconsin.”
“Someone who doesn’t realize he doesn’t have his phone.”
“So, not Curtis then.”
“Maybe someone he met?”
It felt like good news. If someone was trying to call Benjamin in central Wisconsin, then chances were that’s where he was—not Mexico or Canada, not Florida or California. But who would be calling him?
Robert and I exchanged looks, clueless. Afternoon was mellowing, low purple clouds spreading like a bruise above the lake. Robert’s friend Pete hadn’t been able to find us the name of Dr. Campbell Senior’s nursing home.
“I see at least a dozen facilities in the area,” Robert said. “Independent, assisted, downtown, hinterlands . . .”
“He has money—or he used to. Let’s pick the nicest one and start there.”
“What makes a nursing home nice?”
“I don’t know. The view?”
“We were a pair, he and I,” Mattathias Campbell Sr. said a half hour later, ladling another spoonful of creamy leek soup into his mouth.
Robert pointed at the old man’s shirtfront. “You got some there.”
Outside the nursing home’s dining room window, past the lakeside streets of downtown Fond du Lac, Lake Winnebago shimmered in golden light. It had been a lucky guess.
When Campbell Sr. reached a shaking hand toward me, I thought he was following Robert’s suggestion, asking me to pass him a cloth napkin, but he was only gesturing for a wicker basket filled with plastic-wrapped Saltine crackers.
I was about to slide one packet over to him when a staff member of the nursing home came toward us.
“Woah, woah. Not for him. He chokes. You doing okay, Mr. Campbell?”
Over a mouthful of lumpy soup, he said, “Dr. Campbell.”
“I apologize. Dr. Campbell.”
Meanwhile, another elderly man at the opposite end of the round tablecloth-covered table finished his soup and stared out into space. He didn’t talk, but he was an excellent chewer. A dozen bits of cracker plastic littered his side of the table.
The room held about ten tables in all, each one occupied by two, three, or four elderly people.
It wasn’t a bad-looking place, and instead of giving us a hard time at the front desk, as I’d expected, they’d welcomed us almost too enthusiastically, explaining that Dr. Campbell Sr. received few visitors.
Not even his son?
Not lately.
When we’d introduced ourselves to Dr. Campbell himself and said we’d both been his patients, he’d beamed, eager to tell every staff member who came by. Look how well they’re doing. My patients. See that?
“You were saying?” I jogged his memory. “About your son?”
“He doesn’t come by as much, now that he’s married.”
No point in explaining that Curtis’s wife and daughter were dead.
“But he was helping you sell the house, wasn’t he?”
Dr. Campbell Sr. grimaced, like his dentures had slipped—or maybe it was nothing physical at all, only the painful interruption of a helpful delusion.
He worked his jaw a few times, squinting. “Oh, we don’t have to sell the house. It’s not a bother, and I’ll be cutting back my hours soon. Then I’ll have more time to look after things. These rotations are murder.”
Robert raised his eyebrow at “rotation.” He pulled out his phone in response to a chime and mouthed the word Jaguar to me. Then he leaned into my shoulder, whispering. “Someone saw it parked in a restaurant lot in downtown Fond du Lac. That’s our best lead. Let’s get out of here.”
“Not yet,” I said, hand up. I needed focus. Dr. Campbell Sr. needed it even more.
“You’ve always been busy, isn’t that right?” I asked, trying to grab the thread that was slipping away.
“Jenny complains I work too many hours. I keep telling her, it’ll be worth it. Wait and see. ‘Learn to defer gratification,’ I always told our son. Can’t be a success if you’re a hothead, always now now now, gimme gimme. That’s how he was as a little boy. But he mastered himself. I give him that.”
We’d been going in circles like this since we’d sat down, but at least Dr. Campbell Sr. seemed pleased rather than agitated each time either of us steered the subject back to Curtis.
“Did you ever practice together? You said you were quite the pair. I don’t know if you meant you were just similar or if you worked side by side?”
“We couldn’t have worked together. He’s his own man. That’s fine. You do things your way and I’ll do them mine.”
Robert and I exchanged glances, both of us looking for the lost key to the man’s memories.
Robert asked, “You both like to camp, fish, anything like that?”
Dr. Campbell Sr.’s mouth split into a loose, wet grin. He pushed the mostly empty soup bowl away. “Ohhhh, yes. Fishing. Certainly. Even better when we didn’t catch anything, though. That’s what Jenny said. Have fun and don’t catch anything!”
“Any particular spot?”
A waiter interrupted, removing the soup bowl.
Dr. Campbell Sr. set his liver-spotted hands on the table and leaned forward, fingers pressed into the tablecloth, stilling his tremor. “I can tell you just where to go. You leave the marina—”
“Which marina?” Robert interrupted.
“Well, the one with the yacht club, of course.”
“Is this club on the lake near your house, on Lake Winnebago, or is it on Lake Michigan? At Sheboygan? Where are we talking about?”
“Let him answer,” I cautioned Robert, grabbing my phone.
I saw a public boat launch in Fond du Lac, on Lake Winnebago.
Only one yacht club, close to town. Sheboygan, on Lake Michigan, was forty-five minutes away, to the east. When Dr. Campbell Sr. was younger, I reminded myself, he was a busy, busy man.
Back and forth to Lake Michigan would take too long.
The nearest yacht club, on Winnebago, was convenient.
“You and Curtis would go,” I prompted. “When he was a boy? When he was all grown up?”
Dr. Campbell Sr. frowned. We were confusing him.
“Your son, Curtis, the doctor.”
Now he showed his gums, smiling. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Behind us, a rattly cart pulled up with the next course. Pale, overcooked pink salmon next to a lump of mashed potatoes. Dr. Campbell Sr. clapped his hands with anticipation. We were losing him.
“The pair of us,” he said, removing his hands slowly, so that the waiter could set down the plate. “Pair of docs. See? Curtis came up with that. Jenny wanted something else, but Curtis gets what he wants. Always has. Pair of docs.”
“Pair of docs,” I repeated, watching his shaky hand reach slowly for the fork.
He frowned. “You’re saying it wrong.”
Robert looked to me. Deepening his Chicago workingclass accent, he tried, “Pair o’ docs?”
“That’s better.”
I tensed with frustration. “Pair o’ docs. Pair o’ docs.”
Dr. Campbell Sr. had just started reaching for the crackers again when I jumped up from my seat, startling everyone at the table. “Robert. I’ve got it.”