Page 7

7

MACK

“Who the fuck is that?” The words reverberate in my mind still, later that night.

I pause the video at 10:31 p.m. and try to zoom in for the hundredth time, thinking something will spontaneously change, but it only shows a pixelated blur.

When Billy decided we needed a couple of Bloody Marys instead of coffee this morning upon seeing me suppress a panic attack while watching the surprise footage in his father’s office, he sat with me and showed me how to email myself the large video file in Dropbox. And now I sit at home in my bed, wrapped in an electric blanket with Linus and Nugget burrowed under with me, their little Chihuahua noses pressed against my legs as I rewind and replay the short clip over and over.

I called Shelby nine times trying to warn her that the footage exists and that Billy’s mother couldn’t hand it over to the news fast enough, relishing being part of the mystery and spreading the drama of it all. And now I’m not only obsessing over this useless clip, I’m worried about her and why she’s not answering.

I pick up my glass of wine from the nightstand and sip it, staring at the blur some more. I want to find something, anything in this footage, and when I do, I want it to make me certain it wasn’t Leo in that frozen frame. God, just give me that. Just give me peace that he wasn’t the monster I know people whisper about in this town. But I don’t get to have peace because it’s fuzzy and distant, and utterly stupid and pointless. And I can’t tell. It could be a woman, for all this footage gives me. Lou was right when he said he had nothing. There’s no value here. It could be anyone in the entire world. Then, when I replay again, I see the movement of something—the knitted end of a scarf it looks like—flitting into the edge of the frame. I was so focused on the figure, I hadn’t paid attention to the foreground.

Chills run up my arms as I wonder…is that just a passerby? Or at that time of night, with a storm raging and with the place closed, is this a second person involved?

Suddenly I leap out of bed, startled by the dogs clawing their way out from under the covers and barking wildly, flying down the hallway, going nuts over something. I pull on a robe and slip my feet into slippers because it’s freezing in here even though I keep inching up the thermostat. I assume they’re losing their mind over an Amazon delivery guy, but they stop at the door to the basement instead. They scratch and howl at the gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. I try to pick up Linus, but he wiggles out of my arm and scratches at the door frame.

“What’s down there, guys?” I say mindlessly as I move to the kitchen for a wine refill, because they bark at everything that moves, and it’s always nothing more than the wind blowing usually, but then I stop in my tracks. Because shit…what is down there?

I stay frozen when I hear a rattling noise. I put my glass down and pluck a knife from the drawer and stand behind my dogs, looking at the basement door. The door itself is rattling slightly, not like someone is jiggling it because it’s not locked, but like the wind is shaking it. Wind. In the basement.

“Shit, shit, shit.” I keep the knife in hand and cover my head with the hood of my robe.

“Stay here,” I tell Linus and Nugget as they jump at me in excitement. I walk out into the darkness and trudge through the deep, powdery snow around the side of the house. Snow is falling into the opening of my slippers and wind is cutting through my flimsy fleece robe.

“Fuckedy fuck,” I mutter until I reach the back and see what I expected to see. The cellar door that opens from the back of the house with stairs leading down to the basement is wide-open. Okay, I didn’t exactly expect to see that since it’s been padlocked closed for a decade, but nothing else can explain wind coming up the basement stairs.

I lumber through the deep snow until I reach the open doors, thinking maybe the lock rusted and these winds finally broke it off, but when I see the lock up close, it’s clear it was cut clean through. These doors must have been open all day, which explains why it’s so cold in the house. Someone was here when I was at work. I feel my heart thump and the cold makes me shake, and I’m too afraid to shut the doors now, because what if I’m locking someone into my house? I’ll stay out here and freeze to death while I call the police first—have them clear the place, I think. But shit, my phone is inside. I consider walking the quarter mile to the next house, but I’d probably die from frostbite in this robe. Why didn’t I put on the boots by the front door? There’s no way. I have to go back in.

Then I hear something. A tiny sound—like a whimper, or crying. I try to look down into the basement with only the small bit of moonlight behind me and the pilot light from the water heater down there to see anything by. I see movement. I’m frozen in fear for a moment, but before I can run, or think, or anything, the light catches two small eyes and I scream so bloodcurdlingly loud that I wonder if the neighbors might have heard and might come to help.

Then to my shock, I realize it’s not a psychopath waiting to murder me. It’s an animal. It cries again, and my instinct to help a hurt animal—an instinct that overrides almost all else in life—takes over, and I rush down the stairs to see what’s happened.

It backs up and hides under the stairs, and I pull the cord for the basement light on and follow it. Once I see it cowering in the corner of the staircase I hold out my hand, and it doesn’t come to me. It backs up into the concrete wall to the side of the stairs and presses its little forehead into it, but there is a Braveheart poster hanging there from a million years ago when Leo was gonna make this area a man cave until he gave up on the idea. The poster tears with the weight of the dog backing into it. The poor, sweet dog stands wet and shivering as I move toward it, and I realize the tear in the poster leads to an opening behind it. I rip the poster off the wall and see something that shocks me to my core.

It’s a crawl space or hidey-hole or whatever you want to call it that’s been chiseled out of concrete and covered with a Mel fucking Gibson poster. To hide…what?

I see only a couple of cardboard boxes inside. Holy shit. Leo went to a lot of trouble to hide something to the extent that even police detectives couldn’t find it. Not that they looked very hard. “He left of his own accord” is the consensus, so they’re not searching my basement for hiding spots to solve the mystery, that’s for sure. First, I approach the dog, and it doesn’t run now that I have it gently cornered and I’m speaking to him in the obnoxious baby voice I speak to my other dogs in, telling it to “come to mama.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” I say, reaching out and stroking its head. “Poor baby.” It lets me pick it up and wrap it in my robe, so I climb the stairs on the opposite side of the basement that leads to the door off the kitchen, and I’m greeted by Linus and Nugget growling and barking at the bundle in my arms.

“Oh, calm down guys,” I grunt as I bring the dog into my bedroom and wrap him in blankets by the fireplace. When I go back downstairs, I carry a flashlight and an old padlock. I close the cellar doors and lock them again, this time from the inside so the lock can’t be cut. Then I pull the boxes out of the crawl space and balance them one on top of the other, teeth chattering as I get the hell out of this awful dungeon and run up the stairs, back to the warmth of my kitchen as fast as I can manage.

Now that I know there’s nobody in the basement and my adrenaline is pumping, I clear the rest of the house myself. My gut tells me whoever was in here came when I was away and is long gone. The dogs would have been losing their minds barking all night if there was still someone here, and this realization makes me feel a whole lot calmer.

Still I go room by room, whipping open closet doors and shower curtains, even kitchen cabinets as if some psychopath would contort themselves to lie in wait in my cereal cupboard, but you never know, so I check everything. Once I am confident it’s all clear, I check all the door locks one more time and double-check the basement door off the kitchen too.

If somebody got through the cellar locks, they had to have been inside my house, and the thought sends waves of nausea through me. What did they want? What the hell were they looking for? This? I stare at the boxes. They are both filled with stacks of paper. That’s it. Paper. Not body parts or gold bars, or a secret key to some safe-deposit box with a billion dollars in it. So what the hell was he hiding all this for?

Before I wrap my head around starting to sift through it all, I pour a bowl of food for the stray pup and grab some towels to dry off this little guy. Once he settles, I put down bowls for Nugget and Linus and after they sniff the new guy for a minute, they calm down and eat. All of us sit on the floor in front of the fireplace and I begin sifting through the boxes I found.

“Where did you come from?” I ask as he leans into me, shivering. I tuck the blanket around him and hold him close to me. Of course he was looking for a warm place if he was out in this weather. He’s probably a Lab mix, and I’m guessing wandered over from the Millers’ farm because they always seem to have a dozen dogs they can’t take care of.

“You look like a Gus,” I tell him, and I keep him in my arms as we all warm up together, and I stare again at the boxes in front of me. My instinct should be to tear them open so I know what the hell could possibly be so important, but there’s a bigger part of me that doesn’t really want to know. Because right now there is still… I don’t know, hope, I guess. But something in there might change everything. Did he have a mistress? Is he on the dark web as some sort of pedophile? A serial rapist? My mind is reeling. There was a moment I thought that maybe that crawl space was from the previous owner, but I can see Leonard Connolly written on every visible file poking out, so it’s his, and my stomach lurches again.

The first files I look through are a few debts I didn’t know about, and high interest loans he took out to pay them back. His work bag went missing when he did, and I’ve always found that hard to understand because he was out for drinks before he disappeared, so why would his work bag be gone? And I have always wondered if he kept all of his financial papers in his work bag to hide this shit from me…once I discovered all his debt the hard way, long after he was gone. I still wonder what’s with his missing bag, but there are a lot of documents that he went to great trouble to make sure I never saw, so I guess most of this I probably already figured out by other means and online accounts I discovered. What else is there that hasn’t already blown up in my face?

Then I see a file about the Oleander Terrace. I try to put Gus on the floor, but he presses his head into my chest again and I can’t bear to put him down, poor baby, so I open the file with one hand, patting Gus’s little back with the other, and page through the papers on the floor. I don’t really understand what I’m looking at. I know Leo bought the Oleander’s when his mother moved in there as some grand gesture, back when all his investments were doing well. His mother passed soon after that, but he kept the business, and as far as I know, it’s still afloat. Even though Shelby, who had been there years before Leo and a partner bought it up, complains about it barely staying in business.

Leo always said most facilities like that are privately owned. Most are struggling or understaffed already, and he was gonna turn that around—a labor of love for his mother because he was thriving and thought he could do anything in business in those days. After his other investments went under and the Oleander’s started to struggle, he blamed it on COVID like he did everything else, citing ninety percent of facilities were grappling with devastating losses, etcetera, etcetera, and I’m sure he planned to unload the place like every other one of his investments until…he vanished.

But what doesn’t make sense is that it looks like the residents’ personal checks to fund their stay, and the Medicare and Medicaid checks, are filtered through a bank account at Northview Bank. The deposit amounts don’t match funds paid out to the Oleander’s and Leo did all of his business banking through Affinity Plus. So what is all this? I truly cannot make sense of it, but it’s something. And I know who might be able to make sense of it.

Miles Kessler was his business partner when they bought the place, but Miles didn’t last more than six months, and now that I see this, I need to know why he left. Leo said it was because of Miles’s problem with alcohol—that Leo needed to buy him out because it was affecting the business. Fair enough. I bet that if I call down to the Trout right now and ask for Miles Kessler, I’ll be told he’s hunched over an old-fashioned at the end of the bar next to the scratch-off booth, coat still on, by himself, and intermittently crying, like almost every night. He’s a permanent fixture.

“Okay,” I say to Gus. “You stay here and I’ll be back,” but he whimpers when I try to put him down and my heart breaks. I try again. “Come on, bubs, you can stay by the fire. Look, I have a puppy cookie,” I say, taking out one of the boys’ biscuits from my robe pocket. Linus sits up and gives me a look. Gus just leans his head into my chest.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I say. And I know I won’t leave him alone. He’s still a puppy—a pretty big puppy, but still young, and scared after what he must have been through in the cold to wander all the way over here. So I find my big parka with the fuzzy hood, and I tuck him inside and he sits on my lap in the car as we drive through the snowy streets over to the Trout to find Miles at the end of the bar.

When I arrive, the place is busting at the seams with body heat and everyone’s big coats and drunk voices. Strings of Christmas lights and garland still hang from neon beer signs and decorate the sides of the pool table. A woman sings a Pat Benatar song on the karaoke stage and it’s warm and inviting as ever. I spot Miles immediately, as I knew I would.

Then I spot Billy behind the bar with a martini shaker in hand.

“Looks the same to me,” I say, bellying up to the bar top as he serves cosmos to a couple of twentysomethings who look ridiculous in their light leather jackets and heels the way only young women can get away with when it’s subzero outside, but attracting male attention is still more important than pneumonia.

“Thought I would wait until things thawed out in the spring before bothering to do any updates,” he says smiling. And it’s nice that he doesn’t make my appearance here awkward since he did apologize a dozen times for his father this morning and I still sort of just ran out of the place without saying anything to him after I got the footage I needed, leaving him two Bloody Marys to himself. He doesn’t mention it.

Then, to my horror, I notice I’m still wearing my house slippers and I don’t have a stitch of makeup on and I’m suddenly very conscious of how disheveled I must look. I can feel myself blushing in front of him and simultaneously questioning why I care so much.

“You have a dog,” he says without a note of judgment and I become a bit less self-conscious and remember that’s really part of the reason I stay here. A woman in fuzzy slippers and a man’s parka with a dog hidden inside doesn’t really turn heads in these parts.

“This is Gus. He has no owner, apparently. It’s a long story. Can I buy some jerky from you?” I ask, pointing to the jar on the counter.

“On the house,” he says. “May I?” he asks, and I nod. He opens the jerky and feeds it to Gus.

“He likes you.” I smile, because the gesture warms my heart a little bit, and I notice the tiny moments like this ever since my life became like living in the pits of hell most days.

“If I had to guess your drink…” he says.

“It’s whatever Miles is having,” I say, and Billy raises his eyebrows, looks down to Miles and then back at me with a nod.

“Okey doke.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I move down the bar and sit next to Miles. He doesn’t acknowledge me. Now there’s a man belting out a Neil Young song on the mic, and it makes Miles look even smaller and sadder, if that’s possible. I tap him on the arm, and he looks up at me with swollen, bloodshot eyes, but he smiles broadly.

“Heya, Mackie Mack! Whatcha doin’ here? Let me buy you a drink. I won ten bucks on the scratch-offs,” he says proudly, showing me his win.

“Heya, Miles,” I say back. “I just came to ask you a question actually, so how about I buy you one and maybe you can help me out.”

He looks around and then points to himself. “You came lookin’ for me?” he says, and before he gets the wrong idea or I gag, I just jump right in.

“Yeah, listen. Can I ask you about when you and Leo went in on buying up the care home—the Ole?” I say, and his head drops.

“Oh” is all he mutters.

“Oh what?”

“I didn’t have nothin’ to do with all that and I can prove it,” he says, and my heart speeds up a little bit.

“With what?” I ask.

“I left as soon as I found out what Leo was doin’.”

“Wait, he said he bought you out because…” I don’t mention the alcoholic part. “Because you weren’t pulling your weight,” I say instead.

“That’s so fucking typical. That’s what he said, huh? Me. After everything, he coulda come up with a story that didn’t make me the bad guy. Well, ain’t that some bullshit. I shoulda turned him in, shit.”

“Miles. Turned him in for what?”

“Oh, come on. You gotta know all the shit he was into by now. He was skimming part of all the residents checks into his own account before they went through to the Oleander’s system. You’d think stealing from your own business would be an idiot thing to do, but he realized there was no money to be made with the place and I don’t know how he was planning to unload the whole thing, but I’m sure he had something in mind,” he says, and Billy comes over and places two Manhattans in front of us.

He aims a concerned look my way when he sees the expression on my face, but I shake my head with a tight smile to indicate it’s fine and he doesn’t have to toss Miles out or anything, which he looks like he’d be happy to do. I feel sick to my stomach. I’m also a bit surprised at how easily Miles is offering up this information, but I guess he’s hammered, and also probably keen to defend himself if trouble around Leo or money is being stirred up with his name attached.

Everything I’ve learned about the family man that I loved—that everyone adored and looked up to—has changed me, chipped away at who I thought I was bit by bit, but this is vile. Stealing from the elderly who already have little enough to be living at the Ole? My God. Who was he? How could I have not known any of this?

I’m not some idiot who turned her head to all her husband’s indiscretions or pretended shit wasn’t happening to keep a marriage together. We talked about everything. Everything , I thought. He was my best friend.

After almost a year and half, I have been able to absorb some of the shock, but this… Was he really this person?

“So you never told anybody? You just let him steal from vulnerable people?” I say, and it comes out just as accusatory as it sounded in my head.

“Look, Mack, he paid me out, plus a nice bonus. I walked away. It was his mess, and I wasn’t gonna ruin his life,” he says, slurring his words but trying to mask it. “If he let the place go under and lost his investment, nothing new. Nobody was gonna die. The residents would be bussed off to different homes on the outskirts, and that’s shitty, but I didn’t make it my problem. Couldn’t afford to,” he says.

I blink at him. There is a lull in the karaoke, and I hear the rise and fall of the conversations around me. One of the high-heel girls barks out a high-pitched laugh. Billy’s voice asking people what they’re having and placing napkins on the bar, bot tle tops popping, a karaoke host trying to fill the void with awkward forced enthusiasm for the next singer. It all swirls around me while it sets in that Leo was a terrible fucking person. The love of my life was a thief and a really good liar.

“Thanks,” I say to Miles, sliding my Manhattan next to his half-empty glass for him to have and leaving a twenty on the bar. There’s nothing else to say to him. That’s exactly what those checks and that paperwork I looked through mean. It’s all clear. I just want to go home and somehow try to make sense of it all.

Is this what got him killed? Does someone know what he did?

Shelby can’t possibly know or she would have told me. I know she would have. I need to find out, though. Because what happened to her that night is clearly connected, and what if there are things she knows about this that she’s not telling me?

As I get up to leave, I see Billy out of the corner of my eye wave the lowball glass in his hand at me and call my name. For the second time today I’m just walking away without a word, and I don’t have the energy to care that he probably thinks I’m as unstable and broken as everyone whispers about. I just carry little Gus to the car and I wait for it to heat up before I pull away.

I see the orange glow of the bar windows and hear the music spilling out into the parking lot. The warmth and the friends and the laughter—the happiness I can’t imagine ever truly feeling again—my whole body aches with a longing to go back in time and remember what it’s like before I lost myself.

I look over at the box of files I brought just in case Miles acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about so I could show him. I dig around inside one more time, waiting for the damn heat to start blowing through the frozen car vents and the window to deice.

I look at the Oleander file again with such a feeling of shame, even though it wasn’t me who took their money. Then I see one more manila envelope in the box. I pull it out and see paperwork for an account at Northview Bank. There’s a password written on the back.

Holy shit, it has all of his routing and account numbers. With trembling fingers I pull out my phone and find the bank’s website, and go to the log-in page. I use the account number and the scribbled password, and the account opens. All of his activity is right there in front of me.

Blood swooshes between my ears and my head feels light as I try to catch my breath. Tears begin to well behind my eyes when I see it.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I mumble as I shakily scroll through the page. Gus cries upon feeling me panic. I try to catch my breath. The screen blurs through my tears as I take in what I’m seeing.

This is Leo’s secret account. The last withdrawal was yesterday. That son of a bitch is still alive.