Authors: Chris Culver
He drove off, and I walked around the exterior of my home, looking to make sure my windows were still intact and that no one had kicked in any of my other doors. After deciding that the place looked secure, I walked inside again but stopped in the kitchen. Katherine and I bought that house three years ago, and nearly every time I came home in those three years, someone—Simon, Katherine, Ashley—had greeted me. The quiet emptiness now magnified the melancholy that had been developing inside me.
Before leaving the kitchen, I grabbed a footstool and turned on the front hall lights. The first time I had laid eyes on my house, I fell in love with it. I think Katherine did, too. Our realtor warned us not to do that, but we couldn’t help it; it fit us. It had character, room to expand, great schools, and a fantastic yard for Simon, everything we had wanted. Before we had even finished the tour, I had already started imagining myself teaching my kids how to throw a baseball in the backyard.
I had never been uncomfortable in it until that moment.
The floor creaked as I walked to the master bedroom. Our bed was made, the drawers on our dressers were shut, and the blinds were still half-drawn, just as Katherine had left them that morning. I dragged the stool to the closet and set it up beneath the cold-air return. I’m just a little over six feet, so I could have moved the cold-air return grate without the stool, but I wouldn’t have been able to see in. If Tess had left me something, I wanted to know what it was before I tried removing it.
I moved my t-shirts to the bed to free up some room and then took one step up and then another, making me eye-level with the air return. As soon as I touched the grate, it fell forward, the fasteners that normally anchored it to the wall having been partially unscrewed.
Even with the closet light on, I couldn’t see far inside the duct, but I didn’t need to. Right in the opening, as if it were waiting for me, was a clear plastic bag. I pulled it out and looked at it, expecting to find drugs or a gun. Instead, I found a book. An old book with a cracked, black leather exterior, and a plain, white envelope tucked into the center. I didn’t open the bag, not because I feared leaving my fingerprints anywhere, but because I already knew what the book said and what it represented. The dull emptiness in my gut began to fill with dread.
I put the grate back on the cold-air return and finger-tightened the screws so it wouldn’t fall out. The past is a nasty thing. As soon as you turn your back on it, it returns, rearing its head like an angry viper. For nine years now, I had tried to forget my past, move on from it, be the sort of man my wife and niece deserve. If the events in the past few days had taught me anything, though, it was that I couldn’t ignore the person I was. It was a mistake to even try.
I left the book in my kitchen and exited my house through the back door. A train whistled somewhere distant, and a dog barked up the street, but the night was otherwise quiet. I walked along my home’s foundation to the pressure-treated oak plywood door that led to the open-earth crawlspace beneath my office addition. Twice a year I went into that crawlspace to open and close the ventilation grates, twice a year and no more since we bought the house. I hesitated before unlatching the door. This would be my third trip down this year, something I had been hoping to avoid ever doing. It was time, though.
I stepped inside. The space smelled damp and earthy, as it usually did, and I could hear crickets chirping. Although it was officially a “crawl” space, the opening had enough headspace that I could nearly stand erect, save the corners in which the earth sloped upward. Pink rigid foam insulation covered the walls and paperbacked insulation filled the joist cavities above my head. I knew what I needed to do down there, so I didn’t hesitate.
I walked to the northeast corner of the room and peeled the insulation down from the ceiling in one long piece, exposing the pink cottony fiberglass on the underside of the paper barrier. When we bought the house and I installed that insulation, I had stripped the fiberglass from an approximately two-foot section of it, leaving just the paper backing. Between the joists where that insulation should have been, I built a plywood shelf from the remnants of the plywood I had used to build the door. On that shelf was a navy blue duffel bag. I pulled it down now and felt its weight—roughly fifty pounds—on my shoulder.
I’ve done a lot of things I regret, my dealings with Tess more than any other. If I could go back in time and change what happened, I would without hesitation or concern for my own welfare. But I couldn’t change the past any more than I could control the weather. All I could do was live with the consequences. I unzipped the bag and rooted inside. Few people know how heavy cash actually is. A million dollars in hundred-dollar bills weighs twenty-two pounds. I knew that because I had to reinforce my rather flimsy shelf to hold the two million dollars Tess and I had extorted from Dominique Girard before we set him up for murder.
I pushed the money aside and reached to the bottom of the bag for the two Ziploc bags I knew would be inside. The first held a Sig Sauer P220 in a black nylon holster. My Uncle Simon had given it to me, but I had made it my own through practice. It had a black alloy frame, polymer grip, and it held a magazine with eight rounds of .45 caliber ammunition. The trigger pull was roughly ten pounds, and it had a kick to it, but that didn’t impede its accuracy or reliability. I routinely hit five-inch clusters at sixty yards when I took it to a range and could probably do that all day. It was a good firearm.
I took the weapon and racked the slide to chamber a round. If Tess and Moses came back, they’d find out I’m a little more challenging than my elderly dog.
I attached the nylon holster to my belt and then reached into the duffel bag again, this time pulling out the second Ziploc bag and feeling the papers inside crinkle beneath my fingers. I hadn’t looked at that bag in years, but I had thought about it often. I had thought about burning it, about shredding it, about tearing it apart and tossing it into the Mississippi River and watching the current carry it out of my life, but as much as I wanted it gone, I couldn’t get rid of it. It was my insurance policy.
I zipped the duffel bag up, hoisted it back onto its shelf, and then repositioned the insulation to cover it. Now my real work began.
As soon as I got back into the kitchen, I filled my kettle with water and turned on the stove. Whenever I start writing a new book, I start by creating my villain. I like the villains, not because I identify with them, but because they’re realistic. Villains have lived and lost. Villains—the interesting sort, not the ne’er-do-well serial murderers or sociopaths that populate so much of contemporary crime fiction—have experienced life’s highs and its lows and allowed themselves to be affected by them. Every good hero is a villain in waiting, just one tragedy away. Sometimes, you don’t even know who they are.
My teakettle’s shrill whistle woke me from my reverie. I put a sachet of Earl Grey in a cup and poured the boiling water into it, hoping the caffeine would help me stay up and sort things out. On my way to the dining room, I grabbed the book I had taken from the ventilation duct upstairs and the pages I had taken from my stash in the crawl space and took my tea to the table. For a few minutes, I didn’t do anything but sit and stare at the book, at the last volume of Tess’s journal. She started it, she once told me, when she was in high school, after her freshman English teacher suggested that it would help her become a better writer. She went through three nondescript notebooks a year, and rarely did I see them.
The one in front of me, though, was special. I took it out of the Ziploc bag and felt the soft black leather. I had ordered that notebook from a company in Italy and given it to her on her nineteenth birthday. Back then, we were both naive enough to believe we’d one day become famous novelists, and we’d tour the world together, writing about the interesting things we saw and did. Back then, we’d even critique each other’s stories and poems. In a way, Tess was my first everything. My first love, my first and best friend, my first editor, even.
I got my first short story published in a literary magazine my freshman year of college. Tess was excited about it, but I knew it was bittersweet for her because that same magazine had repeatedly rejected her work. The night I received my acceptance letter, Tess made me dinner and told me her dream was silly and that she was going to quit writing and focus on something else, on something she was good at. I gave her the notebook in the hopes that she’d keep plugging away. Her dreams had made her happy, at least at one time, so I thought they were worth pursuing.
I don’t know if I convinced her or if she came to the decision on her own, but in the end, she kept writing. Other things started changing, though. The Girard family is one of the oldest and wealthiest in St. Louis, and they’ve lived here since the city’s founding. We even learned about them in Missouri History for the family’s role in the fur trade, the economic powerhouse that drove early St. Louis’s economy. When that trade died, the family switched to livestock and other agricultural goods, but when the railroads began to replace river traffic, the family diversified and bought a rail line that ran from St. Louis to Chicago and other points north and west. When that dried up as well, they moved into fossil fuels and today own one of the largest privately held oil and gas exploration companies in the country.
Dominique maintained offices across the world and took his family to Africa at least once a year. Ostensibly, it was a family vacation, but he always made a point of visiting the far points of his business empire. Normally, Tess came back from those trips happy and with pictures and stories. One trip the summer before our sophomore year of college, though, she came back a different person. She was moody, she didn’t want to be alone with me, she didn’t want to talk to me, and she started wearing baggy, heavy clothes even in the summer. I thought she was depressed; I even talked about it with her sister, Samantha, and tried to set up an appointment with a counselor for her.
It wasn’t until I was in her apartment while she took a shower one day that I saw that notebook on her desk and read the pages she had torn out and thrown in the trash. It was then that I had learned the truth. She was depressed, and she had every reason to be.
Now, at my kitchen table, I opened the notebook to the center where the pages had been torn out and slipped inside the pages I had taken from Tess’s trash a decade ago, the ones I had kept in my duffel bag. I hadn’t read from this notebook in a long time, and I realized as I looked at it again that I had picked the wrong drink.
I took my tea to the kitchen and dumped it in the sink before picking up a bottle of bourbon from our liquor cabinet. I poured for a three-count—approximately the amount of liquor in a shot—and then reconsidered and poured until the cup was full. I took my drink back with me to the table and started to read.
July 3
rd
We leave tomorrow morning for Nairobi, and I don’t plan to write while I’m away. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach. We go to Kenya and parts west every year, but this year feels different. Dominique is taking us to Angola. He claims it’s safe and that we’ll have a good time, but I’m nervous just the same. He says it’s a vacation, but I’ve heard him talking on the phone. He wants to set up an office there and begin developing a potential oil deposit. To do that, though, he needs to impress somebody, and Samantha, Mom, and I are the window dressing that makes Girard Holdings look good. I don’t blame him for it; we are pretty foxy, after all.
That’s not what bothers me, though. I’ve watched Dominique before he opens a new territory. He talks faster, sleeps less, researches more. He’s doing all that, but now there’s a raw energy about him that I’ve never before seen. I don’t know what that means, and it makes me nervous. Business has been poor lately, as the price of oil has declined. I know he’s losing money, but I worry about him. I worry about us all.
On better news, when I get back, I think I’m going to ask Steve to marry me. He’s old-fashioned, so I know he’ll never expect it. We’ll wait until we graduate for the actual ceremony, of course, but I’m ready to spend my life with him. I hope he says yes. I think he will. And if he doesn’t, I’ve got a pretty good idea about how to convince him. Men only want one thing, so I’ve heard, and Steve seems to think I’m good at it. A little more practice won’t hurt either of us.
July 6
th
I didn’t plan to write while we were on vacation, but I’ve decided a little capriciousness won’t hurt me. We’ve been in Nairobi for over a day now, and it’s dreadfully, powerfully hot. Tomorrow, we’ll go to a national park where we might be able to see some elephants. I hope we do. They’re beautiful animals.
Dominique, as expected, has been moody since we arrived. We’ll go to Angola at the end of the week, and hopefully he’ll perk up once he has his business deal. I wish he had let me take Steve. I always feel so much better when he’s around.
I stopped reading. Tess didn’t write again for the rest of her trip, but she picked up, or at least she tried to pick up again, when she came home. The first two entries just had a date, as if she had started writing and then thought better of it. She actually started writing on the third, but then she scribbled out what she had written. There were thumb-shaped smudges at the bottom of the page. I think she had been crying and wiped her tears away before closing the book. It took her almost a month to write something, and once she did, she tore it out of the notebook and threw the pages away. Those were the pages I’d found in her trash.
August 7
th
I can’t do this any more. I can’t fucking do this.
August 10
th
It doesn’t go away. I thought it would, I hoped it would, but it doesn’t. I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t even want to get out of bed.
August 11
th
Steve keeps calling. He’s worried, I know he is, and I would be too if our positions were reversed. I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know if he’d still care about me. I don’t know if I’d want him to.
Whenever I go somewhere any more, I feel like people are watching me, like they know. I know that’s stupid, but I see them whispering behind my back and talking. If they’re not talking about me, what are they talking about? I’m surrounded by people, but I feel so alone. I wish they would just leave me be.
August 11
th
Second entry today. Dominique thanked me for all I did in Africa to help him get his deal. If I had a gun, I would have shot him. My mom knows what happened, and when I tried to talk to her, she called me a slut. I think she was drunk. I hope she was, because it hurt.
August 24
th
I’ve tried to forget about it. I’ve tried to bury it, but I can’t stop seeing his face. Every time I close my eyes, I see him. I feel those hands holding me down, I feel his weight on top of me, I smell his breath and his sweat.
I can’t stop crying. I thought it would get better, but it hasn’t. I went home today for lunch with Mom and Samantha. While I was cutting an apple, the knife slipped out of my hand and clattered against the tile. Samantha came in to make sure I was all right, and I started crying. I couldn’t stop. She has no idea what happened to me, and I can’t tell her. I want to, but I can’t bring myself to tell anyone. If I’m not angry, I’m crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not even in control of myself any more.
August 27
th
I don’t know how much longer I can live like this. I went to the police today and told a uniformed officer what had happened to me. He sent me to a detective who asked me questions and took my statement, but I don’t think he believed me. Even if he did, it doesn’t matter because he said they couldn’t prosecute a crime that happened overseas. All he did was offer to give my name to a social worker who could recommend a counselor.
I’m so angry right now that I’m shaking. I’m going to confront Dominique tonight and make him talk. I feel like I could just snap.
August 27
th
, later
I talked to him. He said that if I ever mentioned what happened in Angola again, Moses Tarawally would slit Samantha’s throat in the night and make it look like someone broke into the house. And if he couldn’t kill Samantha, he would kill Steve, or Mom, or my friends. I believe him. I don’t know what to do.
Her entries continued for another couple of months to early December. She had some good days intermixed with the bad, but rarely did she have more than two good days in a row. She was scared. I knew at the time that something had bothered her, but she never talked to me about it. I wished she had. I would have done something for her, or at least I would have tried. I don’t know why she tore the pages out of her journal—maybe she thought doing that would rid her of those memories—but they ended on December 5
th
.
Tucked at the end of her journal, between the last page and the leather binding, was a plain white envelope simply addressed to me. Inside it, I had found a letter dated December 16, 2004. I didn’t expect to ever see it again, but now I had it in front of me.
Dear Steve
,
You’ve given me the greatest gift any human being could give another. On my darkest, dreariest days, you were there. You were the best companion I could ever ask for and the best friend I’ve ever known. All I have left in me is the certainty that you love me. It’s what gives me the strength to do what I have to do.
On July 11
th
, my family and I traveled from Nairobi, Kenya to Luanda, Angola so Dominique could negotiate a contract to exploit oil deposits he believed the country possessed. While there, we met a representative of the Ministry of Petroleum named Rafael Cardoso. Mr. Cardoso acted as our host for the trip and the government’s representative. While we were having dinner at his villa, he asked if I were part of the deal my stepfather was trying to broker. Dominique was too shocked to say anything until Mr. Cardoso laughed and said he was kidding. I knew he wasn’t.
We returned to our hotel after dinner. Samantha and I locked and bolted the door to our room, but at approximately two in the morning, Dominique, along with three men I had seen in Mr. Cardoso’s house, knocked on our door. Dominique asked me to come with them and not scare my sister. Mr. Cardoso thought she was too young. I protested, but one of the men grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me out. Those three men took me to a suite where they held me down while Mr. Cardoso raped me. Afterwards, Dominique came in, gave me a robe, and told me to take a shower. I was forced to stay for three days as Mr. Cardoso’s “guest” while my mother, sister, and stepfather went on safari. It was the worst experience of my life.
I’m telling you this not because I want to hurt you, but because I need you to understand. I can’t protect my sister or anyone else, but you can. To prevent me from ever going public, Dominique and his chief of security plan to kill me on the family’s annual ski trip to Vail and make it look as if I had an accident. I overheard them planning it.
If I go to the press with this now, Moses will kill Samantha. And if not Samantha, then you, or someone else I care about. I can’t let that happen. To prevent someone else I love from being hurt, I’m going to kill myself. I know this will hurt you, but I have to do it.
When I’m gone, I’m counting on you to go public with everything. Write about what happened to me, talk about it, tell people. Now, I’m just a silly girl with a history of fighting with her stepfather, but if I kill myself, I’ll be a martyr. People will believe you.
I’m sorry I won’t be there to make you French toast in the morning. I’m sorry I won’t be there to see you grow old. I’m sorry that I’m not strong enough to stay. I can’t do it any more.
I love you, now and always.
Tess Girard
I found that notebook on December 6, ten days before she planned to kill herself. When I read the letter the first time, I was so furious that I couldn’t even think straight. I pocketed the pages she had thrown away, put the journal back on the desk where I found it, and told her that I needed to do a few things before class that afternoon. Tess shouted that she’d see me later, and I left the apartment to drive around the city aimlessly, hoping I’d see Dominique Girard on the street so I could run him down with my car. I had no idea where I was going until I found myself outside a dive bar my Uncle Simon owned in south St. Louis County.
I pulled out a stool while my uncle—my mother’s brother and the closest man I’ve ever had to a real father—washed glasses. I told him everything, and when I finished, he poured me a drink, ran off the only two other customers—both of whom were already drunk—and locked the door. When he came back, his eyes bored into me, black and steely. He asked what I wanted to do, so I told him I wanted to kill Dominique Girard. He convinced me that was a bad idea, and instead asked me a question the answer to which would hurtle my life in a direction I never anticipated.
“Do you love her enough to give up everything for her?” he asked me.
“Yes, I do,” I said.
And I did.