What Strange Creatures (27 page)

By the time I was finished with the story, Nathan’s arm felt very heavy on mine.

“Anyway. The archbishop liked the story. Besides, there wasn’t much to convict Marge on. He let her go on the condition she skip town quickly. Which she didn’t exactly do, and which got her in a little more trouble later, but that’s another story.”

I finally stopped talking. I couldn’t hear anything resembling a snore, so I picked up Nathan’s hand gently and dropped it. It flopped heavily onto his royal purple pillowcase. I waited a few more minutes before I crept out of the bed and down the hall to the office. One floorboard gave a whimper as I started to cross the room to Nathan’s swivel chair.

I prayed as I moved the mouse—prayed Nathan’s computer was on, that he hadn’t gotten wise and password-protected his desktop. He hadn’t. I returned to the Wallace folder and clicked on “Wallace stuff 2.”

This was the footage with Missy that I hadn’t finished the last time I was here.

“Yeah, they questioned me for a few hours altogether. My mother was there in the room. Wasn’t your mom there when they talked to you?”

“On and off,” Kim said. “She took breaks. She went out and got me McDonald’s. At least that’s how I remember it.”

“Do you think you felt pressure to say something that wasn’t true?” Missy asked.

“Aren’t
I
supposed to be interviewing
you
?” Kim said.

Missy rolled her eyes. “What’s the difference? We were both there. Why don’t we just talk instead?”

The young women proceeded to have a lengthy discussion about what would be a “more compelling format.” I paused that interview, eager to see what else Kim had stored. After all, I’d already heard what Missy had to say. I’d go back and finish that interview later.

I clicked on “Wallace stuff 3.”

Dustin Halliday appeared on the screen. His long hair was pulled back, with a couple of oily-looking pieces falling over his eyes. His chin was tilted downward, but his eyes were rolled upward, gazing into the camera with a bored expression.

“Okay,
now
we’re all set,” Kim said from behind the camera.
“
So we’re here because you had something to add to our last interview.”

“Yeah. That’s right.” Dustin’s expression didn’t change. “
All
set.”

“Why don’t you say everything you want to say?” Kim’s enthusiasm seemed out of place with the sole visual of Dustin’s sulk. “And then I’ll ask follow-up questions.”

“All right.” Dustin finally blinked, and he even gave a slight smile. “So there were some things I didn’t say in my last interview.”

“Why are you changing your mind now?”

“Because we know each other now.”

“Okay.”

“And people don’t ask me about this stuff much anymore. Since you actually care, it seems important to be honest.”

“You weren’t honest in the last interview?” Kim asked.

“I’d rather you just threw that interview away and started over with this one.”

“Okay.” Kim sounded a bit impatient. “So what did you want to say now?”

“Well. I can’t just start with that night. I should explain a few things about my parents. About my mother, mainly.”

“Go ahead.”

“I loved my father.” Dustin pushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. “He wasn’t a very emotional guy, but he loved us and he worked hard for us. I was closer to my mother than to him when I was little, so maybe I didn’t see that so well. My mother shouldn’t ever have been married to him. That probably sounds like something lots of people say. But I mean she shouldn’t have been married to
anyone.
She wasn’t normal.”

“Wasn’t normal. I’m sure you’ll want to be more specific.”

“She would get these ideas in her head,” Dustin explained, “that she needed to arrange things to happen a certain way, no matter how it affected the people around her.”

“Okay,” Kim prompted.

“She had a way of making you do things,” Dustin said, glancing away from the camera.

Kim sucked in a breath. “Things like what?”

“Well, just . . . making something seem right, that when you thought about it later wasn’t right at all. Like the time she got me to tell my aunt she needed a nose job.”

“Your aunt?”

Kim zoomed out. I recognized the bluish green–and–white sofa Dustin was sitting in. They were filming the interview in Kim’s apartment.

“Her sister-in-law. My mom hated her. So I guess she wanted to make her feel like shit once in a while.”

“I see.” Kim hesitated. “So you’re saying your mom maybe isn’t the nicest person in the world?”

“Um. I wasn’t going to put it that way.”

“Oh,” Kim said. “How
were
you going to put it?”

While I’d been surprised at what a decent interviewer Kim had been thus far, I wasn’t impressed with her behavior here. It seemed like she was annoying Dustin—just when he was poised, I suspected, to say something important.

“I feel like I already said it.” Dustin folded his arms. “She had a way of making you do things.”

“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?”

Dustin covered his face with his hands. He sat like that for a minute or two. Somewhere in the background, I could hear Wayne barking.

“Nobody got it right,” Dustin said finally.

“Including Donald Wallace?”

Dustin finally uncovered his face. “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about my mother. My family.”

“Okay. Sorry. Go on.”

He swallowed and said, “She told me his gun wasn’t loaded.”

Wayne’s barking came closer.

“Shut UP!” Kim said.

Dustin smiled weakly, then bent down out of the camera’s sight—presumably petting Wayne. “Can you stop the camera for a minute?”

“No,” Kim said. “Let’s just—”

“Really,” Dustin said, straightening up again. “Stop the camera.”

The footage ended there.

“Damn it, Wayne!” I whispered.

What did it mean? That Dustin had shot his father by accident? Where was the next part of this video?

There were no more materials left in Kim’s folder. Of course, it was possible Kim had stored other footage elsewhere on Nathan’s computer but under a less obvious file name. I was convinced she had, because there was stuff on her draft “commercial” that wasn’t contained in her other files. I switched to the desktop but found that Nathan kept it very clean. I’d have to dig a little deeper. Would she have stored videos on iPhoto? I was clueless about this sort of thing. I didn’t ever film anything and didn’t deal with those sorts of files in my stodgy academic life.

Before deciding how to proceed next, I started to look through Nathan’s overhead cabinets in hopes of finding VHS tapes. The left cabinet contained a mug full of Sharpies and an empty tub of something called Dr. Harvey’s Incredible Canary Food. The right cabinet had DVDs piled on the lower shelf and two stacks of VHS tapes on the upper one. I picked up the top one: “Orlando-Bowman.” A wedding, of course.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

I gasped and fell back into the swivel chair.

Nathan was leaning against the office doorway in his boxers. When he turned to face me, I saw he was holding Peaches gently on his arm. She was slithering toward his palm. I shrieked in surprise.

“It’s okay,” Nathan said, stepping closer to me and taking the tape with his free hand. “She doesn’t bite.”

“Uh-huh.” I rolled my chair backward a couple of inches, knocking into Nathan’s desk.

“What were you watching?” he asked softly.

I wasn’t sure what he’d seen.

“
Tootsie.
Sometimes it’s loaded up on YouTube. Or at least clips of it. I was watching clips of it on your computer.” I could hear myself babbling, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “When I was in high school, it was one of the few movies we had on tape. My dad taped it off the TV. So whenever I was desperate to watch something to cheer me up, like in the middle of the night when nothing much was on, I’d pop that in. We didn’t have cable or anything.”

Peaches dipped her head under Nathan’s wrist, then changed directions, slowly moving back up his forearm.

“I guess you didn’t have cable growing up either. Or a VCR for that matter?”

“No.” Nathan frowned. “Well, not exactly. The commune did have a VCR and a TV, actually. We would watch Hindi devotional dramas sometimes.”

“Oh,” I said, getting up.

“So you’d watch
Tootsie,
” he prompted. “When you were a kid.”

“Yeah. When I couldn’t sleep. Do you know who Dustin Hoffman is?”

Dustin.
It must’ve been this name that had made me think to use this old habit as my brilliant cover story.

“Yes,” said Nathan.

“Well, in
Tootsie
he plays an actor who’s desperate for work. He dresses like a woman. It’s really funny.”

“I’ve seen the movie,” Nathan whispered.

“Oh.”

“That’s really what you were doing in here?”

He waved his arm in the direction of his computer. I was terrified he’d fling Peaches at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or I was about to.”

Nathan sank into his chair. I inched out of Peaches’ striking distance. Nathan moved the chair gently back and forth with his feet, avoiding my eyes for a few moments.

“My therapist says I’m destructively trusting,” he said.

“My therapist says I’m desperately charming,” I replied.

“Really?” Nathan looked up at me.

“No,” I admitted. “I don’t have a therapist.”

He sighed and shook his head.

“I mean, I wish I had one. I’d probably have one if they were free.”

“So you do this—you watch
Tootsie
—when you need comforting?”

“Yes,” I said. This part was actually true.

“You need comforting for something?” Peaches’ tongue flickered out, and I jumped.

“Just . . . I mean . . . not sleeping.”

Nathan nodded and then looked at Peaches for a few moments. She began to curl up on his palm.

“That’s why they call them ball pythons,” Nathan said. “Because they tighten up into a ball.”

“Don’t all snakes?”

He didn’t answer.

“Some people have trouble trying to sleep in a bed that’s not their own,” he said after a moment.

“Th-that might be it,” I stammered. “Although I didn’t have trouble last time.”

“No,” Nathan said. He bit his lip and took a deep breath. “But now you do.”

I didn’t reply.

“Now you have trouble,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe that’s the solution. Maybe you need to get back to your own bed. If you’re gonna lie to me.”

Peaches flickered her tongue in agreement. To escape her blood orange stare, I went to the bedroom and gathered my shoulder bag and phone. I didn’t say another word. Nathan walked me through the living room and opened the front door for me.

“Bye,” I said.

“Good-bye, Theresa,” he whispered, and closed the door.

Boober was awake when I got home. I was too distraught to give him any real attention, so I opened a can of Iams.

“Why did I walk out of that house?” I asked him. He yipped for his food. I scooped the contents of the entire can into a dish and slammed it down on the floor. “What was I afraid of?”

Boober ignored me and began chowing down. Wayne waddled in, so I opened another can. As I set down another dish, Rolf came in to give me a look of noncommittal disgust, then leaped onto the top of the refrigerator.

“Maybe that was all the footage she had on his computer anyway,” I said, trying to reassure myself. “Probably she stored the bulk of it only on her own laptop, which is probably with either her family or the police, so . . .”

Not a reassuring thought after all. I stared at the dog-food spoon, tempted to stab my eyes out with it. I hated myself for walking away from Nathan without being sure I’d seen everything I could. Or at least figured out how to e-mail the Dustin footage to myself. How hard could that have been?

But then what did that footage mean, exactly? Was it very significant?

It felt to me as if Dustin was going to say he’d had some part in his father’s death. Certainly such an admission would be of great consequence to Dustin and perhaps other members of his family. But what of Donald Wallace? Would Donald Wallace really care about any of this? Even if this was a big bombshell with regard to the Halliday case, it wasn’t necessarily Wallace’s fault that the authorities had never gotten the truth out of that family.

Was
this
the special footage Kim had bragged to Janice Obermeier about having? Or some other, additional footage of Dustin explaining himself further? Or was it the elusive footage from Colleen Shipley?

I wanted to talk it through with someone. Zach was of course out of the question at this hour—nor did I wish to elucidate to him how I’d worked my way into Nathan’s home and life. Tish was a possibility, but I’d have to explain too much. Plus, Penelope was a terrible sleeper, Tish was always telling me. If I woke her with the phone, Tish would likely be up with her for hours.

Jeff,
I decided. I’d discuss it with Jeff. He was going to be out first thing in the morning. Tomorrow, after my parents were assured he was okay, we’d have the luxury of a private conversation. And I’d have things to tell him. I wished I had more, but at least I had more leads now than the day they hauled him off.

“He’ll be home tomorrow,” I told Rolf, who didn’t acknowledge the good news.

I said it again to Boober, who looked up from his food and licked his lips.

“Good boy,” I said. “I’ll bring you with me. He’ll need cheering up.”

The picture of Boober licking Jeff’s face as he emerged from the county jail filled me with warmth. I took a deep breath. I made a cup of tea and burned an Evening Hearth candle while I drank it. I went to bed.

M
y father is the one who went in and actually bailed Jeff out. Though my mother and Ned provided more of the cash, likely she considered it a dad thing—like buying a fishing pole or a first razor. Mom and I waited in the county jail parking lot—fenced in outside the brick administrative building.