The Last House on Needless Street Read online

  ‘I’ll take a look and be on my way,’ she says. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your day.’

  He shakes his head. ‘You can keep it. Take it with you. You will want a private moment.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, dazed. ‘I mean – thank you.’

  He says, ‘I trust that you will not repeat the Oregon incident. You got carried away there. You were lucky to avoid jail.’

  Dee winces. Of course, that is the kind of thing he would know about. The man from Oregon, who had been at the lake that day. Tired Karen let slip his details to Dee, the location of his hunting cabin.

  Dee has the statistics by heart. The kind of person who took Lulu is an average of twenty-seven years old, unmarried. He is unemployed or works in unskilled labour. He is socially marginal. He is likely to have arrest records for violent crime. The primary motivation for stranger child abduction is—Dee does not allow herself to finish that thought. Over the years, she has acquired the art of making her brain go perfectly blank at will.

  In all respects the man from Oregon was a perfect fit. Dee could not have known that he was miles away in Hoquiam with a flat tyre when Lulu went. That there were nine witnesses to it. The man did not press charges. But Karen was distant, after that.

  ‘How much is it?’ Dee asks, looking into the rich man’s flat blue eyes.

  The man watches her watch him. He slowly pours a glass of lemonade with a shaking hand. His frailty is a performance. His forearms are corded with muscle.

  ‘Not money,’ he says. ‘I want something else.’

  Her flesh begins to walk on her bones.

  ‘No, no.’ He smiles, indulgent. ‘It’s very simple. You know about my hobby. I collect all sorts of curios. But the meat of the collection, the heart of it, I keep in this house. I want you to look. Walk through it, just once.’

  Dee says, ‘I can pay you. Money.’

  ‘Not enough,’ he says gently. ‘Be reasonable.’

  She looks at the view over the trees, at his immaculate clothes, sees his assurance, built with money, and knows that he is right. She doesn’t ask why she should trust him, or how she can be sure that the envelope contains what he says it contains. They are past such things.

  She nods because she does not have a choice.

  He leads her down into the centre of the house. At the bottom of the stairs he unlocks a door made of something that looks like, but surely cannot be, granite. Dee shivers. Perhaps he will lock the door behind her and leave her in there.

  A long gallery stretches ahead running the length of the house. There are no windows. The air is cool, controlled to a fraction of a degree. Display cases and framed photographs line the walls, each lit by a single low spotlight. This is his collection; the museum, he calls it. She has heard of it. It is well known, if your interests lie in that direction. The man obtains things that most people can’t. Things that no one should see. He collects the artefacts of death. Photographs, vials of blood stolen from evidence, letters in spiky Victorian copperplate, pieces of the unclaimed dead, the pieces the killer did not have time to eat before he was caught.

  The room is a corridor of Dee’s nightmares. Each object is a relic of something terrible that could have been done to Lulu. Dee glances at the black-and-white image on the wall to her left. She quickly looks away again.

  ‘You must look,’ he says. ‘That’s the deal.’ He knows precisely what she feels. She can hear it in his voice.

  Dee walks down the gallery. She looks at each display for exactly three seconds before moving on. She makes her mind white static. He walks beside her, intimately close. His skin exudes a faint odour of tin. He doesn’t seem to breathe.

  When Dee reaches the end of the dim corridor, she turns to him and holds out her hand. For a moment he is motionless, and his still blue gaze crawls all over her, head to foot. She understands that he is collecting her, and the moment. Not every memento can be housed in a glass case. She thinks, It’s going to happen now. I’m going to throw up. Then he gives a little nod and puts the envelope into her hand.

  The light and the air are blinding. She wants to weep with gratitude at the sight of trees. But she refuses to give him anything else.

  ‘Drive safe,’ he says, and goes back into his wooden palace. He has taken what he wanted and she holds no more interest. She goes to her car slowly, puts the envelope casually on the passenger seat beside her. She forces herself to drive away through the trees at a leisurely pace. He might still be watching. Dee’s foot twitches on the gas, her breath comes fast.

  As she turns out of the long forested drive, onto the road, she puts her foot down. The engine screams.

  She lets the black ribbon of road take her on and on, until the forest changes to meadows and horses and barns, and they in turn give way to one-storey strip malls. Gasoline hangs heavy on the air. When she has put miles and miles between her and those freezing blue eyes she pulls into a rest stop. She lays her head on the steering wheel and breathes in ragged gasps. Vast trucks roar by, shaking the little car with their passage. She is grateful to them for covering the sounds she makes.

  At length her breathing steadies somewhat. Dee sits up. It is time to find out what she has bought. She suppresses a swell of nausea, opens the envelope and draws out the photograph.

  There it is, the familiar image, lacking only the caption: SUSPECT’S HOUSE SEARCHED. And there he is, the suspect, shading his eyes against the sun. Dee knows this picture. She has asked Karen about it more than once.

  This man had an alibi, tired Karen told Dee, and the search of his house turned up nothing. They had to move on with other lines of enquiry.

  ‘But the people who saw him outside the grocery store might have been wrong,’ Dee said. ‘They were used to seeing him there, expected it. You know, they might fill in the blank place on the sidewalk with a familiar sight, even if he wasn’t actually there.’ Dee understands this, better than most.

  ‘There’s security tape,’ Karen said.

  ‘For the whole time?’ Dee asked. ‘Karen, for the whole afternoon?’ Karen didn’t answer but she didn’t need to. Dee could see the no in the hunch of her shoulders. That was when Karen still gave Dee information, before the incident with the man from Oregon.

  Karen would be concerned if she knew what Dee now holds in her hands. The photograph has not been cropped, as it was for publication in the newspaper. Perhaps it is the photographer’s own print.

  In this picture the view opens out, showing the hidden edges of the scene. Dee’s heart pounds. She forces herself not to hurry, to look at each thing one by one; see it, know it, understand it.

  There are trees in the distance behind the house. Thick, Pacific North West growth, clustering in, overrunning itself. There is a woman in a hat, back turned, walking away along the sidewalk, dragging a hairy terrier on a leash. There are small, pale, curious faces at the window of a farther house. Children.

  Dee sees the most important thing last, as if her mind cannot absorb a success after so many years of trudging failure. The sign on the corner is in plain view, and can be easily read. Needless Street.

  Dee understands for the first time why people faint and how it happens; like a white light going off in her brain, a flash, followed by a dark shock. She now knows where the suspect lived, maybe even still lives. She breathes shallow and fast. That would be enough, but it is not only that.

  ‘We were there that day,’ Dee whispers. ‘Dad took a wrong turn.’ Her mouth fills with the taste of memory and bubble-gum. She must have chewed thirty pieces on that long-ago ride. Dad was driving to the lake but he missed an exit and they ended up wandering, lost, through the endless grey suburbs that hemmed the forest. Then the rows of one-storeys thinned out and gave way to peeling Victorian houses, and the rank wild scent of the woods grew strong. These were streets that went nowhere. She recalls driving past that sign and thinking, Yes, this craphole is totally needless. The street was a dead end, she recalls. Dad wiped his brow and swore under hi
s breath, and they turned around and retraced their steps.

  They found Highway 101 again soon after, and the name of the street receded into the depths of Dee’s mind, to be shelved with other useless information – what colour the attendant’s uniform had been when they stopped for gas, who liked her best at school, who played bass in that band.

  For a moment Dee considers whether this could be coincidence. But she rejects this idea with a strong mental shove. It must be connected, somehow. It must.

  Did the suspect see them driving in their slow lost circles? Did he glimpse Lulu’s bored face at the window, and did he then follow them to the lake? Did Dad even speak to him? Maybe he stopped to ask the suspect for directions. The suspect wouldn’t have needed to follow, then. He would have known their destination, could have gone straight to the lake. Dee tries and tries to remember where Dad pulled over. But just as certain parts of that day are branded on her, charred into her flesh, others are soft and out of focus. It seemed like just another dead-end road. She and Lulu were kids; bored and hot. They didn’t know that these were the last few moments of peace before lightning cracked open the world and everything changed for ever.

  Reason dictates that Dee tell the police. She should call tired Karen, who is still in charge of the case. Lulu is a missing person. No body has been found. (There was a time when Dee would have thought that missing was better than dead, but the long years have taught her better.)

  ‘This is not supposed to happen,’ Karen said once to Dee. ‘Most of us spend our whole career without dealing with a stranger child abduction. It wears you thin, in ways you can’t predict. Sometimes I think, why here? Why me?’

  Dee said, ‘I have a question. Why not do your job?’ Karen went red.

  ‘Lulu wasn’t the first to disappear,’ Dee said. ‘I’ve looked into it. You’ve got a real problem around that lake.’ Maybe that was when it really went sour between them. Sour or not, Dee should call her right away.

  She won’t. This is a particular gift, just for her. And she feels the silky-deep stirring of anger. If the police hadn’t kept her out of everything maybe she would have remembered the street name and made the connection years ago. Wasted, wasted time.

  The photograph has one more secret to yield. Dee peers hard at the suspect’s shirt. Close to, it gets grainy and her eyes protest. But she can see writing there, embroidered across the breast pocket. They must have blurred it out for the newspaper. Dee can make out a name. Ed or maybe Ted, Banner something.

  It feels like striking the last blow in a long, long fight. She has a name or part of one, and a street. Dee finds that she is crying, which doesn’t make sense, because she is filled with fierce certainty. Just for a moment, for one beat of her heart, Dee feels Lulu beside her. The car fills with the scent of warm skin, suntan lotion. A soft, plump cheek brushes against hers. Dee catches the clean smell of her sister’s hair, and the sugar on her breath.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Dee tells her.

  Ted

  It’s the right day, so I go to see the bug man in the morning. I found him in the want ads online. He doesn’t cost as much as the regular ones, so I can afford one session every two weeks. My appointment is always very early, before anyone else is awake – when no one else wants to go, I guess. I enjoy my visits to him. I tell him about Olivia, and how much I love her, and about TV I’ve watched and candy I’ve eaten and the birds in the dawn. I even talk about Mommy and Daddy sometimes. Not too much. I don’t talk about the situation with Lauren or the gods, of course. Each time, I slip in real questions among the dumb stuff. I am slowly working my way up to the big one. I’ll ask it soon. Things with Lauren are getting worse.

  Sometimes talking to him even seems to help. Anyway he prescribes the pills, which definitely help.

  It is a forty-five-minute walk, which I manage OK. It is not quite raining but a warm rotten mist hangs in the air. Headlights throw a musty sheen on the wet road and earthworms writhe pink and gleaming on the sidewalk.

  The bug man’s office is in a building that looks like a pile of children’s blocks, carelessly stacked. The waiting room is empty and I settle happily on a chair. I like this kind of place, where you’re in between one thing and another. Hallways, waiting rooms, lobbies and so on; rooms where nothing is actually supposed to happen. It relieves a lot of pressure and lets me think.

  The air smells strongly of cleaning products, a chemical impression of a flowering meadow. At some point in the future, I guess, almost no one will know what real meadow smells like. Maybe by then there won’t be any real meadows left and they’ll have to make flowers in labs. Then of course they’ll engineer them to smell like cleaning products, because they’ll think that’s right, and it will all go in a circle. These are the kinds of interesting thoughts I have while in waiting rooms and at crosswalks or standing in line at the grocery store.

  The bug man appears and shows me in, adjusting his tie. I think I make him nervous. It’s my size. He hides it well most of the time. He has a belly like a little round scatter cushion, the kind Mommy liked so much. His hair is sparse and blonde. Behind the glasses his eyes are blue and almost perfectly round.

  Obviously I can’t recall his name. He looks like a friendly little shield bug, or a stag beetle. So the bug man is how I think of him.

  The office is pale, pastel, containing far more chairs than could ever be needed in here. They’re all different sizes, shapes and colours. They put me in an agony of indecision. I wonder, is this the bug man’s way of judging my mood? Sometimes I try to think like Lauren, and guess which chair she would pick. She’d probably just throw them around the place.

  I choose a dented, metal fold-out. I hope this severe choice will show him that I am serious about my progress.

  ‘You’ve lost some more hair,’ the bug man says mildly.

  ‘I think my cat pulls it out at night.’

  ‘And your left arm looks badly bruised. What’s up with that?’

  I should have worn long sleeves, I wasn’t thinking.

  ‘I was out on a date,’ I say. ‘She shut the car door on my arm by accident.’ I haven’t actually been on a date yet, but I feel like it’s more likely to happen if I say the words, like a spell that will force me to do it.

  ‘That’s unfortunate,’ he says. ‘Apart from that, did you feel the date went well?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘I had a great time. You know, I’ve been watching this new TV show. It’s about a man who kills people, but only if they deserve it. Bad people, in other words.’

  ‘What do you think appeals to you about this show?’

  ‘It doesn’t appeal to me,’ I say. ‘I think it’s nonsense. You can’t tell what people are like from what they do. You can do a bad thing even though you’re not a bad person. Bad people could do good things accidentally. You can’t really know, is my point.’ I can see him drawing breath to ask me a question so I hurry on. ‘And there was this other TV show where a man killed lots of people, but then he hurt his head in an accident, and when he woke up he thought it was ten years earlier. He didn’t remember killing the people, or the new kinds of cellphone or his wife. He was a different person to the one who killed the women. So was it still his fault, even when it was out of his control?’

  ‘Do you feel that your actions are sometimes out of your control?’

  Careful, I think.

  ‘And there’s this other show,’ I say, ‘about a talking dog. That seems much more realistic to me, in a way, than being able to tell good people from bad. My cat can’t actually speak – I admit that. But I always know what she wants. It’s just as good as talking.’

  ‘Your cat means a lot to you,’ the bug man says.

  ‘She’s my best friend,’ I say, which might be the first true thing I’ve said to him in the six months that I’ve been coming here. A silence falls, not uncomfortable. He writes on his yellow legal pad but it must be about groceries or something, because, really, I’m not giving him anything.

/>   ‘But I am worried about her.’ He glances up. ‘I think she’s …’ I hesitate. ‘I think my cat is, what would you say? Homosexual. Gay. I think my cat is attracted to female cats.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘There’s this other cat she watches, out the window. She watches her all the time. She loves her, I can just tell. My mother would be very upset if she knew I had a homosexual cat. She had very strong feelings about it.’ The scent of vinegar fills the air for a moment and I think I might throw up. I didn’t mean to say any of that.

  ‘Do you think your cat—?’

  ‘I can’t talk about that any more,’ I say.

  ‘Well—’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, no, no, no, NO.’

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘How is your daughter?’

  I wince. I mentioned Lauren once in passing, by accident. It was a big mistake because he has never let it go since. ‘She’s been spending a lot of time at school,’ I say. ‘I haven’t seen her too much.’

  ‘You know, Ted, this session is for you. It’s private. You can say anything here. Some people feel it’s the only place they can really express themselves. In our daily lives can be difficult to say what we think or feel to those closest to us. That is a very isolating experience. It can be lonely, keeping secrets. That’s why it’s important to have somewhere safe, like this. You can say anything to me.’

  ‘Well,’ I say. ‘There are parts of my life I’d like to share with someone, one day. Not you, but someone.’

  He raises his eyebrows.

  ‘I was watching monster trucks on TV last night, and I was thinking, Monster trucks are great. They’re big and loud and fun. It would be so great if I could meet someone who has a love of big trucks, one day.’