Crooked House (18 page)

He thought about
Sarah, too.

Jesus, why did it have to hurt this bad
? Marriage shouldn’t be a chore.

But
Sarah, true to her word, had gone out and bought three Samsung camcorders at about $120 each. They looked like iPhones, but weren’t as heavy. She’d put one in Angela’s room, down in the corner along the back wall, where it could supposedly capture the entire room. She did the same in the sitting room at the top of the stairs, and she’d asked if she could put one in Robert’s study, which he’d flat out refused to allow. If she wanted to bankrupt them with her stupid little projects that was fine, but there was a line he wouldn’t let her cross, no matter how much she begged him. Instead she taped it to the wall in the hall outside of the sitting room. That area, she claimed, was the hot spot, might as well focus her efforts there.

Well, she could focus her efforts on the back of his ass for all he cared
. She wasn’t going to see anything anyway.

She’d linked the camcorders to her laptop downstairs in their bedroom and was running them in a continuous loop
. If anything happened – something he’d laughed out loud about – she could go back and save the footage. When he came downstairs for breakfast that morning she was already at her laptop, watching the video feed.

He didn’t bother to explain where he was going or what he was going to spend the day doing, and she didn’t ask
. So he went upstairs and sat at his desk and thought about all the crap that he had to deal with.

Sometime later, the doorbell chimed.

He waited until the doorbell chimed again and shouted, “Hey, somebody get the door!”

The doorbell went off again.

“God damn it,” he muttered. He went to the top of the stairs. “Hey Angela, answer the door.”

The doorbell again
. This time, four rings in rapid succession. Whoever it was was impatient. And knew somebody was home.

“God damn it.”

Robert went downstairs and opened the door. He winced at the sunlight. The man standing there was thick, but not fat, and holding a manila envelope in his hands. He wore jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, open at the neck, with a shark tooth hanging from a leather necklace, and ratty old boat shoes. His hair was curly, but thinning, like a man of middle age still trying to pass for his early twenties. Behind him, in the drive, was an econo-size rental car.

“Jay
? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Well, I was feeling jealous there for a bit
. I mean, the size of this place. But then you answer the door and well, buddy, I don’t know how to say this, but you look like warmed over shit. What’s that wrong with your neck there?”

Robert touched an itchy spot at the top of his collar and felt the bump and rough spot where the ringworm had started to spread up his neck
. Up to then, he’d been able to keep it hidden under the collars of his shirts, but now, he was wearing just a T-shirt and an old pair of jeans. He hadn’t shaved or showered since the morning of the party two days ago, and he was pretty sure Jay was being generous when he said he looked like shit.

“What do you want, Jay?”

“I told you what I want. Seriously dude, you all right? You’re looking like something that got tossed out the back of a Mexican whorehouse.”

“What the fuck do you care what I look like?”

Jay Carroll stiffened. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t. You know, on the phone, the way you smarted off to me, I figured you for one of those guys who’d be a real pussy in person. But you’re not, are you? You got some balls on you, even if you do look like shit.”

“What do you want, Jay
? I’m about to call the cops.”

Jay laughed
. “You don’t need to do that. I just came over to make sure you take my kid to get that blood test.”

“She’s not your kid
. And I told you that wasn’t gonna happen.”

“Yeah, I know you did
. That’s why I brought you this.”

He held out the manila envelope
. Robert looked at it, then at Jay.

“What’s that?”

“This?” Jay extended the envelope. “This is why you’re gonna take Angela for a blood test.”

“What’s in it?”

“Why don’t you take a look and see?”

“What’s in it, Jay
? I’m about to close this door.”

Jay reached into the envelope and pulled out a single piece of paper
. “You’ve seen that before, I guess.”

Robert saw the letterhead of Thomas Kraft and recognized it right away as the same letter
Sarah had showed him in their bedroom back in Florida the day before they’d left for San Antonio. Except this letter had the line about Jay having “documentary proof that the birth mother is morally unfit to raise a teenage girl” highlighted. In the margins, in red pen, Jay had written “Merry Christmas!”

“What the hell’s this supposed to mean?” Robert said, holding the letter back out for Jay to take.

“You keep that,” Jay said. “And you keep this too.” He held out the manila envelope to Robert, but Robert refused to take it. He dropped it at his Robert’s feet. “Take that into your fancy study there and watch what’s inside. After you watch it, you call me and tell me when you’re gonna take that girl to get her blood test.”

Robert didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of picking up the envelope
. He didn’t even look at it.

“Tell me what’s in it, Jay.”

“A movie. A DVD, actually.”

“A movie?”

“Yep. You watch that, and then you call me and tell me what you think.”

“What kind of game are you playing, Jay?”

“One where I got all the cards, Doc. I promise you that.” He turned and walked back to his car, but stopped before opening the door. “Oh, that DVD you got there, that’s just the part of the movie I figured you’d really want to see. If you want to watch the rest of it, I’ve got it on VHS.”

Robert just stared at him.

“I’ll be hearing from you, Doc. My number’s taped to the disc.”

Jay saluted him and got in the car and backed out.

Robert watched him go, and made sure he was long gone before he bent down and picked up the envelope.

*

Robert slid the DVD into his laptop and sat back in his chair.

He caught a glimpse of a woman with platinum blonde hair, naked on a bed, with a man’s cum all over her tits
. Above her was the man responsible, a rail-skinny guy with an enormous penis. He was stroking it, breathing hard, smiling like he’d just won a gold medal.

“Oh Jesus,” Robert said.

The hairstyle, the video quality, everything about it was out of date and low budget. Robert curled his lip in disgust, even as he felt a stirring in his crotch. He wasn’t above porn. He’d watched it a few times, even bought some, ages ago. But it had always struck him, even when done up fancy with beautiful actresses and expensive equipment, as brutal and pathetic and kind of ridiculous. He had no taste for it.

He reached forward to eject the DVD when the scene changed to the same rail-skinny guy, maybe
nineteen or twenty, now driving a late ‘90s Ford pickup down an empty back alley in some nondescript warehouse district. The guy was reading a map while driving, trying to look lost, even though he clearly couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag.

Then the camera panned over to a girl in a red sundress and cowboy boots standing on the side of the road
. She looked helpless, just as lost as our ostensible hero.

Robert leaned forward again, holding the sides of the laptop in his hands.

The girl in the red sundress, that was Sarah!  Ten years younger, a little thinner, her hair different, but that was Sarah!

Oh God, Robert thought
. He felt like he was going to be sick.

“You lost?” the dude said.

“Can you help me?” Sarah said. Her Southern belle accent was terrible. “My car had a flat back over there. I’d do just about anything if you could help me.”

A closeup of the dude, he looks interested.

Cut to: a scene of the dude getting out of the truck. He’s wearing an outfit that makes him look like an urban cowboy straight out of Central Casting. He’s got the gaudy Western shirt, the tight jeans, the huge belt buckle, the whole nine yards. Robert – dimly –gets why the word
s
Back in the Saddle
4
is written in red ink on the front of the DVD. And for a moment he’d thought it’d be an Aerosmith concert. Ha!

On the video, the dude gets out and leans against his truck
. He likes what he’s looking at.

Cut to:
Sarah. She likes getting looked at.

The dude:  “You know what’s wrong with your car?”

Sarah:  “No idea.” She turned a big pair of doe eyes up at the camera. “I guess it got rode too hard.”

“Well that’s just a shame, ma’am,” the dude said.

Then Robert watched in horror as his wife muddled her way through a few more lines of bad dialogue before climbing into the bed of the truck and proceeding to fuck the rail-skinny dude like a three-dollar whore. He watched her grunt and shove, push and moan, taking the skinny dude with the enormous cock like she was born to do it, before finally kneeling in front of him and getting the full blast of his gunk all over her face.

To Robert
– and after ten years of marriage he thought he knew her pretty damn well – it looked like she actually enjoyed it.

*

Together, Sarah and Angela made a dinner of fettuccini Alfredo with ham and broccoli and ate it in the breakfast nook. Though it was obvious she wanted to, Angela hadn’t asked what was wrong with Daddy, and Sarah was grateful for that. She just didn’t have the energy right now to explain what was going on to her daughter. In fact, she wasn’t all that sure she could explain it to herself at the moment. She knew only that the good life she thought she had was crumbling and slipping between her fingers.

And that Robert had, apparently, finally cracked.

The last few days, since all the weird stuff started happening around the house, she’d looked for excuses to get away, and take Angela with her. They’d taken advantage of the nice weather today and gone exploring on the Riverwalk downtown and window-shopping at the Quarry Market, finally coming back to the house a little before five. She’d called for Robert, hoping that perhaps a little time to himself would mellow him out, but she and Angela both froze when they heard him upstairs, roaring and bellowing, knocking things over. It sounded like he was in his office, but at least once she’d heard him stamping his feet and sobbing as he marched down the east wing. She heard him arguing with himself, singing to himself, even yelling a few times. She thought maybe he was drunk. But drunk or not, he’d clearly gone over the edge.

That was all before dinner
. A little while ago, maybe an hour or so, he’d slipped into silence and they hadn’t heard so much as a peep from upstairs. Mother and daughter had waited nervously for what would come next, but after a while it began to seem that he’d calmed down, or perhaps even gone to sleep.

So they made dinner and afterwards played a few hands of Uno and then went down to the master bedroom to watch the video feed on
Sarah’s laptop.

There was nothing on the recordings, just hours of footage showing empty rooms, and
Sarah was a little shocked to discover that she was disappointed. She had expected to see something, what she wasn’t sure, maybe a door closing by itself, maybe a curtain rustling for no reason. She didn’t know, exactly, what she hoped to see, but it certainly wasn’t a lot of nothing.

“Maybe nothing happens when the cameras are on, like when you take your car to the mechanic and it doesn’t make that noise.”

Sarah smiled. “I bet you’re right. That’s probably exactly what it is.” She sighed and turned the computer’s display back to the live feed. “What do you say, kiddo, sleep in here with me tonight?”

Angela nodded, but she looked uncertain.

“What is it?”

“What about...
” Her eyes shifted toward the ceiling, toward Robert’s study.

“I don’t think he’ll come down, baby
. He’s got that cot up there.”

Angela looked like she wanted to believe, but some intuition held her back.

“I promise you, we’ll be okay. You got me, kiddo, forever and for always.”

Angela nodded.

Sarah took her daughter in her arms and held her close. “We’re gonna be all right, baby. I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere.”

*

Come here you little shit. Mommy’s not gonna hurt you.

Sarah
bolted upright in bed. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving, her body and hair wet with sweat. For a moment, she was disoriented. She didn’t know where she was,and panic felt like a frantic little rat trying to claw its way out of her skull. The sheets were twisted around her legs. They too were soaking wet. She gripped them and closed her eyes and pushed the panic back down.