What Strange Creatures (34 page)

The Thompsonville police had trouble determining if I’d really come into Nathan’s house uninvited. He told them he thought I might have had a “misunderstanding” about his desire to see me again and refused to press charges. I insisted that my brother had not been with me—that I’d come for a romantic interlude.

Still, the story was in the paper for all to see the following morning—a tiny story, but front page, below the fold, due to the connection with my brother’s soiled name. Zach had been calling all morning, leaving messages, saying he was starting to watch the files on the memory stick and babbling about how he should turn himself in so the police would be certain it wasn’t Jeff helping me. I ignored the calls, hoping to clear my head and determine my next move before talking to him—or anyone. First of all, I decided I couldn’t endure work that day. Reluctantly I picked up my cell to call Tish.

“What were you thinking?” she demanded, answering after one ring.

“If you call your dad for me and tell him what bad shape I’m in, I’ll treat you to our next ten dinners out.”

“You don’t need to do that, okay? You just need to be
careful.
You know you could’ve gotten Jeff into even more trouble? Good thing he had a solid alibi.”

“Who’s that?” I said. “What’re you talking about?”

“He was with
me,
Theresa.”

“Why . . . ?”

“Yes, I’ll call my dad. He won’t care.” Tish cleared her throat. “He says you’re creating a big distraction anyway.”

“A
distraction
? Is it my fault that my personal life is more interesting than finding fifty ways to say ‘Smells like cinnamon’? Does your dad know how easily distracted these people are?”

Tish hung up on me.

Jeff with Tish?
Apparently he’d decided to go ahead and tell her all the things he didn’t want to say to her through a piece of glass. And apparently she’d wanted to hear them.

Next I called Zach to tell him to quit worrying and go teach his morning class.

“You just leave the memory stick for me in your box in the English office,” I said. “I want to watch it all myself.”

“Okay,” he said. “There’s nothing much useful, though. As far as I can tell. I watched most of it. I didn’t see much that you didn’t already describe to me before. Nothing from the nineties, with Donald Wallace.”

“Even in that new file you found?”

“A lot of people saying what a shame it was about Andrew Abbott going to jail. No one saying anything new.”

“I’d like to pick it up anyway,” I said, clinging to his “most of it” for hope. Most was not all. He may have missed something. We might still find Jeff’s saving grace.

I spent the morning watching all the footage on Zach’s memory stick.

There was, as Zach said, no footage from the early nineties.

All Kim had saved on the “KG Backup” were longer versions of the interviews she’d excerpted in her “commercial”—Andrew Abbott’s cousin, the young guy who worked at the nonprofit New England Project for Justice. Nothing that would set Wallace’s campaign on fire.

I was glad for the chance to watch the Dustin interviews again, though—particularly the second one.

The most interesting exchange came near the end, before Wayne interrupted the interview:

“She had a way of making you do things,” Dustin had said.

“By ‘you’ you mean yourself.”

“Yeah. Me. And my brother. She was a master manipulator.”

“And how does that apply to the night your father died, Dustin?”

I’d certainly noticed the mention of Dustin’s brother the first time I’d seen this. But so much else had been going on at the time—inside this footage and outside it—that I hadn’t given it a great deal of attention. I’d wondered since then if Dustin had been set to reveal something about his own involvement in the shooting. Now I wondered if he’d been poised to reveal something about his brother. Had his brother ever gotten wind of it?

I had given up easily on the Hallidays because I’d been with Jeff at the time. Now I was on my own, and I had an afternoon to kill.

I sipped a cold latte while I sat in my car outside Trenton Halliday’s house, turning on the heat occasionally and listening to NPR: first an interview with someone who’d written a book on Internet technology’s impact on the U.S. Postal Service, then a story about the history of chocolate chips. It reminded me of the old days—of when Brendan had to have NPR constantly piped into his car, our kitchen, our marriage bed, even—on a few Saturday mornings when neither of us was enterprising enough to reach over and press
SNOOZE
.

After about an hour and forty-five minutes, a young man and woman emerged from the front door and approached a light green compact car parked on the street. The woman was the one I’d encountered two days earlier. The man, however, was not Trenton Halliday. This man was younger and skinnier, with floppy skater hair. It was Dustin. He got into the passenger side of the car as the woman unlocked it. I started my car and then pulled behind them as they zipped onto the main road.

I followed them for about five minutes, and then another car came between us. After about two miles, the green Easter egg pulled in to an office park. I followed but lingered near the entrance while Dustin’s car drove right up to one of the buildings. Dustin got out, and the car sped away.

By the time I parked, Dustin had disappeared into the building. I followed him and studied the office map in the front hall. On the first floor, there were two dental groups and a chiropractor. On the second was an ear, nose, and throat doctor and two “licensed therapists.” The third had drug and alcohol counseling and another dentist. Dustin had likely headed to floor two or three, but I decided to stay put at the entrance and wait for him to come out.

As people left the building, I amused myself by guessing which specialist they’d seen. Finally Dustin emerged from one of the elevators.

“Dustin?” I said, my heart thudding.

He walked right through the glass doors, avoiding my gaze. Maybe he hadn’t heard me, I told myself. I followed him outside and into the parking lot.

I repeated his name—louder this time.

His steps slowed, then quickened. He made his way to the landscaped divider that separated this parking lot from the next property.

“Dustin,” I said again.

He finally whirled around. “Yeah? Do I know you?”

“No. But I believe you knew my friend Kim Graber.”

“Kim? Yeah. I did. She was your friend? What’s your name?”

“Margery,” I said. “Would you mind talking to me for a minute? I know you two were in contact shortly before she died.”

“Someone’s about to pick me up.” Dustin took a step away from me.

“Just a couple minutes. Till your ride gets here.”

He hesitated, then looked alarmed. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I really need to talk about Kim, man.”

The “man” actually seemed to defuse his anxiety.

“I’m sorry about Kim,” he said, flashing me an exaggerated frown that I supposed was meant to be sympathetic.

“I appreciate that.”

“It’s been kind of hard for me, too,” he said. “Even though I didn’t know her long. We got pretty close.”

“She mentioned that,” I said, stepping closer to him.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Dustin slid a pair of puffy gloves out of his coat pocket and began to put them on. “What did she say about me?”

I hesitated. “Um, well. Were you angry with Kim the day she disappeared?”

He wrapped his arms around his chest, then nodded. “I was.”

“Why, though?” I asked softly, trying to keep my tone kindly and commiserating.

“Because she stood me up. We were supposed to hang out the night before, and she didn’t show.”

“Was she going to interview you again?” I asked.

Dustin’s eyes widened. “She told you about that stuff?”

“She told me pretty much everything,” I said, giving an apologetic shrug.

“That Friday night we were just supposed to hang out.” He sighed. “As friends. I guess she wasn’t interested in that, once she realized I wasn’t going to be as useful as she thought.”

“What does that mean?”

Dustin just shook his head.

“The weekend she disappeared, you texted her,” I said. “You referred to a video. Were you angry with her about something related to that?”

“No. That was something else.”

“Something else?”

“Just something stupid I e-mailed her from my phone.”

“Do you still have it? Can you show it to me?”

He stepped away from me again. “It wouldn’t interest you. It was just something I had on my phone. Someone I know being a jackass. Anyway, my phone was stolen about three weeks ago. Someone clocked me in the back of the head while I was drunk coming out of Farley’s and took my wallet and my phone. So I don’t have it.”

“That’s why you weren’t answering your phone for a while?” I said.

“Yeah. It took me some time to get my number reestablished.”

I nodded. “I saw the interview where you were saying your mom told you the gun wasn’t loaded. You were saying she made you do things.”

“Uh . . . yeah?”

“Like what, Dustin?”

He glanced at the office building before meeting my gaze. “I just met you,” he said.

“Sometimes I find it easier to talk to strangers,” I said. “Isn’t that why you come here to this office anyway?”

“But why do
you
care?” Dustin asked, unfazed by my bumbling response.

There was something so sad and so boyish in his question. I wondered if he wasn’t even more damaged than everyone had described.

“Because I want to finish what Kim started,” I said quickly, before my conscience could have a chance to mess up this opportunity. “She told me your story. Everything.”

Dustin folded his arms. “Okay. My mother made me tell that story about the intruders. And saying that was easier than saying what I really saw.”

“Which was what?” I demanded.

“I saw my mother shoot my father. I saw him die.”

The words stunned me. They weren’t exactly surprising. Just horrifying. Not words you ever expect to hear out of anyone’s mouth, under any circumstances.

“There were no intruders,” he said softly.

He said these words as if they were somehow more significant than the first. Of course there were no intruders. Wasn’t that obvious to everyone?

“Kim was disappointed to hear it,” Dustin said. “Are you?”

“I–I . . . um . . .” I stammered, feeling wretched. “I don’t know. . . . That wouldn’t be the word I’d—”

“Kim was the first person I ever told. And I could tell she was disappointed.”

The police and the prosecutors
had
gotten it wrong, in a sense. The right person was in jail. But Dustin hadn’t woken up when he’d heard a gunshot. He’d actually seen the shooting take place. And after years of repeating his mother’s story, it was significant to
him
to finally admit that it was untrue. Kim, of course, had been after something else. If Donald Wallace had a
pattern
of wrongful convictions, Andrew Abbott wouldn’t so much feel like her fault.

“What about your friend from juvenile detention?” I said. “Michael Johnson?”

“Who’s Michael Johnson?” Dustin asked.

“Your friend in juvenile detention. Wasn’t that his real name? In the book you said he was the only one you felt you could tell the whole truth about what really happened that night with your dad.”

“The book?” he repeated.

I was starting to wonder if Dustin was a little bit baked.

“Zachary Wagner’s book.
Juvie.
”

“Oh, right. The book. I guess I may have said that. May not have. Fifty-fifty.”

“So that wasn’t accurate?”

“Do you believe everything you read, lady?”

I chafed at being called “lady.” “Are you saying that something in the book wasn’t fair?”

“Oh, I didn’t say it wasn’t fair. That’s different.”

“Okay, then . . .”

“You know what my brother says about that book? ‘Fair is when everyone is portrayed how they want to be and everyone’s okay with it. Accurate would be if everyone was portrayed exactly as they are.’ Something like that.”

This conversation was getting too philosophical for me.

“Dustin, what did your brother think of what you were doing with Kim?”

He shrugged. “He didn’t know about it until after she died. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, till a few weeks ago.”

“But what did he think of the things you were telling her? Did it bother him?”

Dustin shook his head. “My brother knows what my mother was capable of. He learned earlier than me. He learned it when she had him start a fire in the kitchen. That didn’t turn out how it was supposed to—the house didn’t burn down. Our dad got out. But it made her more confident. Because no one suspected a thing. She thought she could get away with
anything.
”

More sad revelations, but none that Kim would’ve found useful.

“What did Kim say when you told her all this?” I asked.

“She was very sympathetic. For a little while. But I didn’t have anything she could use to slap Donald Wallace with. And that was when she lost interest. She wanted everything to be about Wallace. I’m not one to talk, but that girl had some issues. Sure, she was part of a big, tragic mess when she was a kid. But Donald Wallace didn’t create the mess. He just sewed together a story about it that made sense, at the time, from the pieces he got to see. I kept wondering when she was gonna maybe figure out he wasn’t the right one—or at least the only one—to be mad at. That she should be mad at whoever gave him those pieces.”

“And who was that? In Kim’s case?”

Dustin sighed heavily, as if he didn’t know where to begin.

“Did she ever tell you anything about her boyfriend?” I asked.

“The one they arrested? Or the old one?”

“Um . . . either one.”

The little green hatchback buzzed into the parking lot and stopped in front of the building from which we’d just come. Inside the car I could discern a figure craning her neck to see if Dustin was behind the glass doors. Dustin seemed to spot her but kept talking.