The Laughterhouse (33 page)

“So why hasn’t he done it already? If he knows we have everybody from fifteen years ago under guard, why not finish it now?” I ask.

Barlow shrugs. “Who’s to say he hasn’t already?”

It’s a chilling thought.

“Which means if he hasn’t done it already, he has something else in mind,” I say.

Barlow nods. “And Caleb is the only one who knows what that is.”

Caleb parks on a quiet street near town behind a car that is similar to the one he’s driving right down to the color, and climbs out. He tightens his jacket around him and blows into his hands. Octavia is staring at him through the window, the juice box in her hand. Katy is watching too. There are wisps of fog, only just a few, up high around the bulbs of the streetlights. It takes him a minute to use the pocketknife he found in the glove compartment to unscrew each plate. He puts the old ones on the other car, hoping the owner won’t immediately notice. He remembers from his old life that when you had to take something apart, or fix something, there would always be one screw that would be way too tight and the head of it would strip away, making it useless. Every two-minute job in his life that required the use of a tool became a thirty-minute ordeal.

But not this time. Even the two of the eight screws that are rusted come away without much effort. He’ll take that as an omen. And why not? He’s owed some good omens. The doctor stays quiet in the trunk.

He gets back into the car. This all should have been over by now. He fucked up last night. He should have paced himself, ignored that asshole from town who paid for Ariel, just gotten into his car and gone door-to-door like a salesman, selling the people responsible for all of this a death that was long overdue.

He wanted to finish it in the slaughterhouse, but the reality is he can finish it on the side of the road if he has to.

Judge Latham—if he had to choose to let one of the two slide, it would be him. The judge made a decision on the facts presented to him. He believed the defending lawyers and the doctor—he deserves to be punished, and maybe in another life that will happen.

The mother—there’s no choice there. He has to get to her. And driving around with the doctor and two daughters in his car is only tempting fate. The doctor will only stay quiet for so long.

He needs somebody who can help him. He can’t drive to Whitby’s mother’s house. He can’t try the pizza trick again. His neighbor from way back when would have called the cops. There is nobody in this world he can turn to.

Katy is sitting up in the seat behind him. She still isn’t saying anything. She tightens her mouth to prove just how quiet she’s being.

“Put your seat belt on,” he tells her.

He expects her to ask why. Instead she does as he asks.

“Are you cold?”

She nods. He turns on the heater and points the vents toward the back of the car.

It may not be true that there is nobody in the world who will help him. There is one other woman. He wanted to go and visit her. He wanted to see if she was doing okay, but he never did. He felt if he visited her, all he would be doing was picking at the scabs of her life and reopening old wounds.

She is his only chance.

He uses his phone to look up her address.

There’s a media circus outside the department and I have to drive through it on my way to see Ariel Chancellor’s parents. I’m using my own car again because all the others are in use. I drive out the gates and through the barrage of questions and bright lights, fighting the temptation to find out how well reporters work as speed bumps. It’s after ten o’clock, town is lit up from streetlights and nightclubs, the alcohol in the city starting to flow. More boy-racers will fill the streets as the hours tick by, teenagers with nowhere better to be or nothing better to do, all of them slaves to the current fashion of drinking as much as they can as quickly as they can. A few of them are already throwing bottles from their cars, arcing them out over the street into the path of pedestrians or oncoming cars. I have to slow down a few times to avoid hitting clusters of drunk people staggering out into the road.

I head home and spend five minutes cleaning up a little from my run in with the dog. I ball up my pants and throw them into
the trash. I put on a fresh pair and am about to head out the door when my cell rings. It’s Dr. Forster.

“You missed the appointment,” he says with his smooth-talking voice. Forster is the kind of guy who makes you feel like you’re his friend when he’s talking to you. He has the kind of voice that would probably make cute woodland creatures follow him around if he sang.

“I know.”

“I’ve seen you on the news. You’re working again?”

“Trying to.”

“You’re working on this Caleb Cole thing?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s awful,” he says. “How can a man do all of that?” I’m not so sure he’s really after an answer so I don’t give him one, and he carries on. “I saw your wife,” he tells me.

“And?”

“And I looked her over. I spent an hour with her. Physically, she’s in great health. The nurses are doing a great job of exercising her. They’re taking care of her.”

“I know,” I say. “But did you notice anything?”

“I’ve made an appointment for her to be brought into the hospital,” he says. “I can see her in three weeks.”

“You’ve noticed something, haven’t you,” I say, trying to keep the excitement from taking over.

“She’s responsive to flashing light,” he says. “Nurse Hamilton said last night she stood at the window and stared at the police lights. She said nurses through the night kept finding her there until they ended up sedating her.”

I didn’t know she had kept going back to the window. My heart is starting to race. “And?” I say, knowing there’s more. Or at least hoping.

“And this morning, at the pond, I think it’s likely she was looking at the sun reflecting off the ripples caused by the breeze. More flickering light. So I ran a penlight past her eyes.
She was unresponsive. But when I tried the test a few minutes later her eyes followed the light.”

“She’s never done that before.”

“No.”

I sit down. “So that’s good, right?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “With brain injuries, there’s always a lot going on. Or a lot that’s not going on. You can’t just get in there and take a look. Sometimes the brain rewires itself, other times it just atrophies. In three weeks hopefully we’ll know more.”

The word
hopefully
is as unappealing as the time frame. “Three weeks? Why not tomorrow?”

“Because Bridget isn’t my only patient, Theodore. If there are any changes, Nurse Hamilton will let me know. It’s very important you don’t read anything more into this than what happened—her optic nerves had an automatic response and her eyes followed the light. I repeated the test five more times while I was there over the hour, and failed to get the same result.”

“But the tests—”

“The tests will happen in three weeks. And then we’ll know more.”

“So there’s a chance that—”

“Theo, there’s always a chance. Miracles happen every day. But that’s what they are—miracles. I’ll send you the details of her appointment.”

When he hangs up I head outside, knowing the next three weeks are going to go slower than the four months I spent in jail.

It’s a ten-minute drive to the Chancellors’ house and the streets are mostly empty, a few people are out for walks holding hands, they’re bundled up in jackets, sometimes a dog or two on a leash with them. It’s only a matter of time now before the decreasing temperatures mean thicker jackets and shorter walks. I like the way dogs look at everything as if they’re seeing
it for the first time, the excitement at a tree, a lamppost, at a stick being thrown.

“We haven’t seen our daughter in two years,” Harvey Chancellor says, looking at my badge. “I’m almost too scared to ask what Ariel’s done.”

“Nothing,” I tell him. It’s getting cold on the doorstep and he doesn’t invite me in. It’s a single-storey house with a bird feeder in the middle of the front lawn. There are three cats sitting beneath it and no birds. “But she may be able to help us find somebody.”

“Who? Caleb Cole? He’s the man everybody is looking for, and if you’re here then you must know we used to know him. But not anymore. We can’t help you.”

“Can I come in? There may be something you can tell us that might help find Ariel or Caleb.”

He slowly nods. He has thick gray hair that bounces when he does, something that other men his age must be jealous of. “Okay.”

The house is warm and there’s lots of modern lighting and showroom colors, and when I sit down in the living room all I want to do is put my feet up and take a nap, just a quick one, maybe only six or seven hours. Mr. Chancellor sits opposite me, and his wife comes and joins him. Both Chancellors are in their late fifties and are dressed ten years beyond their age, with Mrs. Chancellor wearing a dressing gown that covers every inch of skin from the neck down and looks like it would make a great job of cleaning the car. Her hair is brown with a few streaks of gray running through it, and she has a hair clip in the side of it that looks heavy enough to damage her neck. She offers to get me a coffee and I tell her it would be great. Giving up coffee almost lasted half a day. I figure that’s pretty good. There are pictures of Ariel on the walls, but none of them are the same woman I saw this morning. These are pictures of another Ariel, a daughter from a different life. The living room is hot, there’s a heat pump blasting warm air. There’s a crime show on
TV. The forensics leads are well-rounded people, finding hairs in one scene with microscopes, then kicking down doors in another. The TV is on mute so for the time being they have to arrest their suspect in silence.

“Ariel works the streets,” Harvey says, “has done for a long time. We tried to stop her and we tried to get her help, of course. I mean, what parents wouldn’t? I say that because it’s important to us you understand that, that you don’t think we abandoned our daughter. The more we tried the worse it got. She used to run away a lot. Not right after the thing with Jessica, but about a year later. Within months she was a different girl. Losing Jessica that way, it changed her. It wasn’t until she was around thirteen that she really started blaming herself. I think that was when she finally understood what had happened. She hated James Whitby and she hated herself.” He looks around for his wife, then smiles at me when he seems to remember she isn’t there. “Coffee won’t be too long,” he says.

I nod and don’t say anything, wanting him to continue. One of the forensics leads on TV has just shot somebody. That’s the thing about TV—the bad guys often end up dying. I wonder if that’s how it will end for Caleb.

“We got her counseling and it didn’t help. She was prescribed antidepressants and the day she got them she took them all. We got her to the hospital just in time. The doctors said another few minutes and she wouldn’t have made it. They said that as it was, it was a miracle she did.”

I think about the word
miracle
again, and part of me is afraid that the miracles in this world are limited and that Ariel Chancellor has used one up that could have gone to my wife. It’s a stupid selfish thought, but there it is, unmasked and real.

“After that she would sneak out at night and come home drunk. She started fooling around with the boys in her school. She was expelled from high school at fifteen when she was caught having sex with two students at the same time for a handful of change in one of the science labs. We got her into
another school and the same thing happened two weeks later. She ran away more and more, and each time we found her she was higher than the last. When she turned seventeen we hardly ever saw her again.”

He gives me the speech and is candid about it in the way a man can be when he’s given the speech so many times there is no more shame in it, not that there is shame at what his daughter did—she was a victim of a crime—but perhaps shame in the fact they couldn’t help her. He doesn’t sound disappointed, doesn’t sound upset—just accepting that this is the way life turned out.

“He used to write to her,” he says. “Caleb, from jail.”

“Write about what?”

“About how much he loved her and how much he hated her. About prison life, about his daughter, about the son he never had, about his wife.”

“You still have the letters?”

He nods. “We wanted to throw them out, but we always thought one day we might need them.”

His wife comes back into the room carrying a tray with three cups on them, catching up on the conversation. “I’ll go and get them, shall I?”

“I think they’re in the closet,” he says, “up on the top shelf behind the jigsaw puzzles.”

“They’re in the spare bedroom,” she says, “under the bed in a box.” She puts the tray down on the coffee table and walks back out.

Harvey gives me the eye roll and half shrug. “This is why it’s so important to be married at this age,” he says.

I nod. I will also be married at his age, and before today I thought Bridget would never be able to tell me where I left my favorite T-shirt—but maybe that isn’t going to be the case.

“I see you know what I mean,” he says, giving a small laugh.

“Sorry?”

“You were smiling,” he says.

“Tell me about the letters.”

“In the beginning they were okay,” he says. “In them Caleb says how sorry he is Ariel went through what she went through, and how he was thankful both girls hadn’t died. Then they became angry. So angry I was amazed he was allowed to send them. I made a complaint and the prison said there was nothing they could do because he was getting the letters out without them being screened. They said it happens all the time, inmates handing the mail to other inmates who are being visited by family, and they said it was a violation of his rights to take away his ability to write. Can you believe that? A guy is writing to my daughter about how he wishes she had been raped and murdered instead of his own girl and the prison authorities say he’s the one with the rights?”

I wince at hearing those words. “That’s what he was saying?”