What Strange Creatures (10 page)

The mention of the young neighborhood witnesses gave me a creeping suspicion about Kim. I did a Google search for “Kim Graber” and “Andrew Abbott.” Nothing useful came up. After I adjusted it to “Kimberly Graber” and “Andrew Abbott,” an article from 2005 came up. I searched the page for Kim’s name and found this:

Pretty intense. And now I was pretty sure who this Missy was whom both Brittany and Kyle had mentioned. Missy as in the nickname for Melissa, most likely.

If Jeff had known about any of this, he had done a pretty good job of keeping it to himself. More likely Kim hadn’t told him. That was one humdinger of a skeleton to have in the closet, after all—to have been involved in one of those old Satanic Panic cases. Painful childhood stories are one thing—but you start talking about Satan and all bets are probably off.

I remembered watching Geraldo Rivera’s Satan special with Jeff when we were kids. My parents must’ve been distracted by their divorce at that time—otherwise I’d like to think they wouldn’t have let us watch it. I couldn’t recall exactly how old we were, but I do remember Jeff and me eating little packaged chocolate puddings while we watched it by ourselves. I probably would’ve been scared if Jeff hadn’t kept making fun of all the mullets. It had been a deliciously depraved evening, like few others in our childhood. And yet no one I knew—not even my old friend Tish, who was often self-righteously gullible when we were kids—
really
seemed afraid of Satan worshippers.

But Kim had been younger. Very young. And a girl her age had been murdered.

Then I looked up “Kyle Spicer.” I couldn’t find anything that connected him directly to the case, but one article mentioned that Jenny had two older brothers. That sounded about right. Kyle had looked to be older than Kim but younger than me. I began to feel like a heel for bothering him at the carpet store. I would think that if you’d had something so horrific happen to someone in your family, you might have a hair-trigger response to strangers and weird intrusions.

Next up was Donald Wallace. A basic search made it clear he was a pretty famous guy in our state. If I weren’t oblivious of politics, I probably would’ve known his name by now.

He’d been considered a shoo-in for Massachusetts’ U.S. Senate seat for some time now. Now that Henry Rowan had died, there’d be a special election. Wallace had been attorney general of the state for six years. Before that he was the D.A. in two different counties—in nearby Pelsworth County for seven years and then a county closer to Boston for another eight. In both places he’d tried a number of well-known cases, several even more notorious than the Jenny Spicer case. There was an abusive-nanny trial and a triple murder, among others.

In any case it seemed to me Kim was right that the media wasn’t talking about Andrew Abbott much now—during the special election. His name showed up in a few right-wing blogs as ammunition against Wallace, but no one seemed to focus much on him. Maybe it was because Wallace had washed his hands of the case when he’d switched counties. He was no longer serving the Fairchester area once Abbott’s new lawyers had started trying to appeal. Or maybe it was because of the doubts people continued to have about Andrew Abbott’s character. He wasn’t exactly a poster boy for the miscarriage of justice. Or maybe it was a bit of media bias. Whatever the case, Kim clearly had an agenda to bring Jenny Spicer and Andrew Abbott into the current political conversation.

Was Kim—a waitress without much more than a tragic past and a penchant for YouTube—the right person to make this happen? She apparently thought so.

I wasn’t sure I understood her motivation, but I admired her confidence.

I
spent most of my afternoon reading through the final copy for our Limited Edition Christmas Cookie Candles, which were set to hit the shelves in just a few weeks. Mr. Whitlock wanted them released at Christmas only every few years, so people might someday clamor for them the way they did for the McRib. This year’s cookie scents were Chocolate Crinkle, Gingersnap Spice, Cranberry-Almond Biscotti, and Peppermint Macaroon. I prayed that my work on these descriptions was sufficient. Truth be told, I hate all candles that smell like baked goods. I would never say so at work, but I simply don’t understand them. Who wants their house to smell like a torturous batch of cookies that is never going to come out of the oven? That no one ever gets to eat?

I spent my final half hour at the office gazing out my cubicle window at the Whitlock’s corporate parking lot. Beyond that, above the trees, I could see the tip of the wick of the giant red replica Whitlock’s candle against the gray afternoon sky. It marks the Whitlock’s flagship superstore. As per an agreement with the town of Thompsonville, it is lit only during the holiday season, in the evenings. So I never see it lit while I work.

As I write at my desk during the day sometimes, I imagine it lighting spontaneously, filling the Thompsonville sky with a blinding but nourishing glow. And I picture myself weeping and wailing at the sight of it. It’s not a
wish
I have per se. It’s just a scene that plays out in my head when my mind begins to numb from candle copy.

I don’t believe in miracles, but boredom tends to fuel my imagination for them. When I was in church as a kid, I used to stare at the crucifix and silently ask God to confirm his existence by shooting lasers out of Jesus’s eyes. He never obliged, and I was always oddly surprised that he didn’t. What everyone else in the church would make of it if it happened was not something I usually concerned myself with.

When I got home, Jeff was there fixing the crank on my kitchen window. I’d asked him to do it a couple of months ago, then forgotten about it.

“Sorry about yesterday,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

He rolled his eyes. “Come on, now. How was work?”

“Fragrant,” I said. “Any news about Kim?”

“No.”

“I looked up the Jenny Spicer trial last night.”

“I figured you might. I did this morning.”

“So that explains her interest in Donald Wallace. I think she may have had a reason for lying to you. She probably felt ashamed. You saw she testified as a kid, didn’t you?”

Jeff nodded and stepped over to the kitchen table without looking at me. “Since we were talking about Zach Wagner, I meant to show you this.”

He picked up a few papers from the kitchen table. He’d also brought a copy of Zach’s book. I recognized the black-and-white cover with its silver medallion. It was a very restrained book jacket—with a simple picture of a bed and a narrow window on the front, and no author photo on the back.
Juvie
was scrawled across the front in all lowercase letters.

“I brought these. Kim left all this on my desk.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t have a printer, so she always prints stuff at my house.”

I took the printouts from him. Sylvestress came in and twined around my ankles as I looked over the stuff.

Most of the printouts were articles about the shooting death of a man named Todd Halliday. His wife claimed he was killed by intruders in their home, but she was convicted of the murder in 2006.

“I’d seen that stuff on my desk a couple of weeks ago but didn’t ask about it,” Jeff said. “Kim’s always printing out a ton of stuff. Girl doesn’t know how to bookmark. She’s not very high-tech. Anyway, it looks like she was really interested in that one case. Where the mom shot the dad. I found Zach’s book under all this stuff. She’d marked a bunch of pages in the section about Dustin Halliday. Even highlighted some stuff.”

“Dustin Halliday?”

“One of Susan and Todd Halliday’s two kids. He was in juvenile detention a few years after his father was killed, and he was one of the kids Zach put in his book. In the book the kid keeps saying the prosecution got it wrong—that his mother wasn’t guilty.”

“Zach did mention that she was interested in him.” I flipped through the papers again. “Donald Wallace prosecuted that case.”

“She never even
mentioned
Wallace to me,” Jeff murmured, picking up Sylvestress. “Not when I was watching all my news shows. Not ever.”

Sylvie pawed at Jeff’s chest and leaped out of his arms.

“Sylvestress hates drunks,” Jeff told me.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I protested weakly.

“I would,” Jeff said.

I couldn’t decide if he was joking, so I didn’t reply.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “I didn’t come here for food. Just to show you this stuff—and to apologize.”

“No need to,” I said, feeling awkward—like I didn’t know him all of a sudden. Like he was a stumbling waiter to whom I needed to be overly polite and reassuring.

I knew how to deal with the Jeff of Our Many Mutual Disappointments. But Jeff with a potential tragedy in his life—the tragedy that Kim seemed to be turning into—that person I wasn’t sure how to speak to.

“I think I’m gonna go home now,” he said. “Watch some news.”

I started to say,
You don’t have to,
but stopped myself. He knew he didn’t have to.

Boober watched him pensively from the living-room window as he got into his car. Unable to pretend I was motivated enough to work on Marge, I read through the printouts about the Halliday murder.

It felt, at first glance, more straightforward than the Andrew Abbott case. At least Satan wasn’t involved. Susan Halliday was convicted of killing her husband with his own gun. Sadly, her two boys—twelve and fourteen then—were at home at the time of the shooting. Dustin—the younger of the two sons—woke up when the gun went off, but his older brother, Trenton, slept through it and awoke right before the police arrived. Susan Halliday claimed that two intruders had come into the house, her husband had confronted them with his handgun, there was a struggle, and he was shot in the neck.

It obviously wasn’t a very believable story. There were no fingerprints on the gun, but Trenton Halliday claimed that he saw his mother wiping down the gun as the family waited for an ambulance to arrive. Additionally, for almost a year Susan Halliday had been sleeping with a coworker of hers at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Donald Wallace and his team made a great deal out of that. Several character witnesses spoke of what a devoted mother Susan was, but no one could deny that the Hallidays’ marriage had been strained for several years.

Dustin claimed to have run into the living room in time to have seen the intruders—a black man and a long-haired white man—leaving the house. But his testimony apparently wasn’t credible. He was confused on the stand and contradicted himself several times. Once he testified that the white intruder looked straight at him and said, “Close your eyes, kid.” When a young female prosecutor on Wallace’s team questioned him, he claimed not to have seen either of the intruders’ faces. He was also unclear as to whether the intruders had dropped the gun (and his mother had picked it up) or taken it with them when they ran.

A local editorial criticized both the prosecution and the defense teams for putting the brothers on the stand, calling it “grotesque” child abuse to set them against each other at such a young age. The writer seemed particularly concerned about Dustin. Though he didn’t come right out and say that Dustin was emotionally unequipped to give accurate testimony, he implied it.

One of the articles showed a picture of Susan coming out of the courthouse. She had a round face with loose-looking skin that had perhaps been tanned too long and too often, a large pointy nose, and a disproportionately cute pixie haircut. Maybe that part was special for the trial. She looked more scared than diabolical to me. But I don’t have a great aptitude for reading faces, so it was hard to say.

I picked up Zach’s book. Kim had bookmarked the section about Dustin and marked off a few different parts of it with a squiggly line of blue ballpoint pen. The first passage she’d marked was this one: