Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) (30 page)

Donna: ambition, guts, energy.

“I’m trusting you,” I said.

“You should. Thanks for the trust. Thanks for the exclusive, too.”

She nodded at me and lugged her camera out of the room. I heard the front door open, then slam shut.

I spent the evening drinking and thinking. I checked the user-group bulletin board where I’d left my messages, but I. R. Shroud had left nothing for me. I composed another note to reiterate my interest in obtaining pictures of a young girl engaged in sexual activity. I now had a young girl in mind, one I somehow remembered but couldn’t say from when or where—and I wondered if this Shroud could help me find her image, and then her. Of course, I couched my request in the kind of bright, vague language that wouldn’t be decipherable to the layperson.

Asking for such a thing, even for a man who is hoping to do some good with it, brings a stain to the soul that no tequila can bleach out.

T
he next morning I crept back into Laguna with all the dignity of a lab rat. The girl who had served me coffee and a donut five times a week for nearly a year looked at me with frank disbelief. The teller at my bank adopted a stiff formality, asked for two forms of ID and double-snapped the new twenties toward me without looking me in the eye. The gas station attendant smiled mercifully as he took one of the new bills, then huddled with a co-worker at the register and they burst out laughing as I walked toward my car. My favorite checker at the market said nothing as she rang up my newspaper and orange juice.

I sat in my car and spread the paper open against the wheel: there I was, above the fold, a Sheriff Department personnel shot that, like a lot of personnel shots, made me look exactly like the criminal I was assumed to be.

Accused Deputy Had Troubled Life
Son’s Death Led to Alcohol Abuse
CNB airs interview tonight

A sheriff deputy accused of sixteen counts of sex with children was suffering stress over the death of his son.

Deputy Terry Naughton, 40, of Laguna Beach, was apparently despondent over the drowning of his five-year-old son two years ago. The incident that claimed the life of Matthew Naughton led the distraught deputy to alcohol abuse and depression, according to sources within the sheriff’s office.

Files obtained by the
Journal
state that Deputy Naughton was “profoundly shaken” by the death of his son, Matthew, in a swimming accident off of Shaw’s Cove in Laguna Beach.

The files also suggested that the deputy may have used alcohol to cope with his son’s death. Sources within the Sheriff Department who wished not to be named said …

I scanned through the rest of the article for information about the cause of Matthew’s death. There was no mention of medical particulars. Or lack of them. Yet.

My fury was whole. Sources within.
Sources within. Files obtained.
Jordan Ishmael? At that moment I could have successfully strangled him, hand-to-hand combat skills or not. Frances? Wade himself? What did it really matter?

Didn’t anyone even care that a monster called The Horridus was out there, watching all of us while I sat in jail? How could they splash my picture all over the paper, but not publish the composite that Amanda had based on Brittany Elder’s eyewitness account? I noted the time for Donna’s interview—7
P.M.
—and hurled the paper into the backseat, spilling orange juice over my lap. I stopped by the hardware store to get batteries for my flashlights, and the pretty young clerk, who had always cheerfully talked with me, gave me nothing but a malignant stare, then sighed as she waited for me to get the plastic bag off her counter. She glanced at my wet pants and thought God knows what.

I drove slowly down to Ardith’s place.

She was waiting for me, as she said she would be. When she opened the door I looked away from her, unwilling to absorb whatever feelings she was having toward me. I had already done more than my share in life to make hers miserable. I knew it; she knew it. I studied her entryway tiles like they were treasures from King Tut’s tomb.

“I’d like to look at the pictures,” I said.

She reached out and brought up my chin so I’d have to look her in the eye.

“All right.”

Haunted is the man who sets foot in a house that used to be his, to face a woman who no longer is. Same furniture—the big things, anyway. Same defined spaces. Same invisible rhythms, same small atmospheres room by room, same ambient sound. And because of that sameness, you feel as if you’ve changed in a million ways you never intended to. You have.

She led me upstairs. There was a small room at the top, with a pillowed bench for reading set below dormer windows that gathered up the mild May sun. Down the short hall to our left was the room that used to be our “office,” although neither of us did much work in it. To the right was Matt’s room.

“Mind if I—”

“—It hasn’t changed.”

I pushed open the door and felt the musty onrush of my son’s habitat. I stepped to the center of the room. There was the smell of plastic and rubber—all those toys and balls. And the smell of clean sheets. There was the sweet, pillowy smell of stuffed animals, and the greenish smell of a bundle of dried twigs and flowers he’d collected with his mother. Then there was the smell of Matthew himself, a low-lying human scent of boy so faint I doubted anyone in the world except me, and certainly Ardith, could even detect it. Lion King poster. Batman poster. Pictures of baseball players cut from sports pages and stuck to the wall with tape slowly whitening in the wake of the years. Pictures, a piggy bank, a peanut butter jar filled with lucky feathers he’d found.

“I can’t do it,” I said, turning.

“Neither can I.”

In the office, Ardith pulled open a sliding closet door and stood before a wall of boxes. Typical of Ardith’s passion for order, the boxes were identical in size and labeled on the tops and on two adjacent corners, so their contents would be discernible from almost any likely angle.

“Which ones, Terry?”

“Matt and me. Say … age four.”

Ardith uncrossed her arms and stepped toward the pasteboard wall. I looked at her. My wife. Once. My one and only. The mother of my vanquished son. I wished all memory would just go away. Every bit of it. Why not a past that is cleaned and polished to a clinical shine? Like an aluminum table in a doctor’s office, a new .45 cartridge, a spaceship?

She spotted the appropriate box and looked back at me. It was shoulder high, so I stepped in and lifted the one above it while she worried it out. She moved back past me and swung it onto the desk.

“It’s been almost six months since I looked at any of this,” she said.

“I’ll go through it alone, if you want.”

“I’d like to be here, if it’s all right with you.”

“Of course it is, Ardith. You know …”

“What?”

“I want to get something real straight between us.”

I saw the fear manifest in the depths of her eyes. With Ardith there was always fear.

“I didn’t do any of the things they’re talking about on the news.”

The fear transformed into something like relief. She nodded and put her hand on my arm. “I know that.”

“If they start crawling all over you—”

“—They already tried. I haven’t said one thing about you or me or Matt. I won’t.”

“Thank you.”

What a strange look came back from her.

The clear tape that sealed the box was already cut. I folded open the four sides and pressed them down. Ardith’s photo books were all the same size and design—pure Ardith, she bought thirty of them all at once because she liked them so much—maybe fourteen inches square, with a floral cloth cover that had a little inset plaque that said
Family Photos.

“These are early in his fourth year, Terry. Do you know what image you’re looking for?”

“It’s me and Matt, wrestling, maybe. Or maybe I’m hugging him. I’m not sure. But I know that I’m kind of bent over, on top of him, with my weight on one arm, and the other around his neck—maybe cradling his head. I don’t know exactly.”

“I think those were taken earlier.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, then go through and see what you find.”

I started with the first book. But I didn’t find the shot that I
knew
I had seen before, the shot that looked so much like the one of me joining a very young girl in sexual congress. I moved through the pages quickly, because they were painful to look at. Matt. Ardith. Me. There were three or four pictures on most pages; two enlargements on others; and some held only one large blowup of a particularly fine photograph. All were held neatly in place by gummed sheets and clear plastic overlays.

There were seven books in the box and I looked through all of them.

“That was the time period,” I said. “Maybe a little more recent.”

“I know you’re going the wrong direction, Terry.”

“Then you go back and I’ll go forward. All right?”

We wrestled out two more boxes. I methodically started at the beginning. Ardith put hers on the floor and sat down beside it, leaning her back against the wall.

I flipped the pages fast, then faster. Matt and me at the beach. Ardith and Matt walking the shoreline—slightly out of focus, poorly centered, my handiwork. Matt taking cuts at the T-ball. Matt hefting a ball toward the bright yellow backboard of a kid’s basketball setup. Ardith getting dressed for a dinner date, standing in front of the mirror with her little black dress on and her hair curled up, fastening a string of pearls around her elegant neck. That was quite a night.

“Oh,” she said.

I put away the book and took out the next: first bike with training wheels, me and a new fishing rod I’d just bought, shots of Matt and me in a little rented boat on Irvine Lake. I was whipping the pages. Too much memory, too much past.

“Terry?”

“
What.
”

Flip, flip, flip.

“It’s not here.”

“
Then look in the next one.
”

Flip, flip, flip.

“I mean, they’re gone. The whole series—all of them.”

Flip, flip, flip.

“
Gone where?
”

“Don’t snap at me. I’m not your wife anymore. Get your butt over here and look for yourself.”

I set my book into the box and moved across the room to look down at Ardith’s. The open pages were blank. She flipped backward to show me two more empty pages, then forward. Six pages, nothing but adhesive and clear overlay.

“They were shots of you and Matt in bed. Remember? It was that morning back four winters ago when it was raining so hard the roads were closed? You called in stranded and we all got in bed and listened to the rain come down? Then we wrestled around like alligators? Remember? I got the camera and shot you and Matt goofing off. Matt had on his pajamas with the—”

“—And I had on my boxers. No top.”

“That’s right. Really nice shots of you guys thrashing around, pulling the bedsheets over your heads. I blew one up to nine by twelve—you on your knees in bed, holding Matt under your right arm and bracing yourself with your left. It was just before you crashed down on top of him, you know, made that growling alligator noise. He was on your forearm, on his back, giggling like crazy and looking up at you and in the picture your faces are so close it looks like you’re about to kiss. And your eyes were shut—remember that shot?”

“Perfectly.”

“Well, somebody stole it. And all the others of that morning. The whole series is gone.”

As would any cop, any doubter, any ex, I studied Ardith’s face for falsehood. There was none.

“Terry … what did you want that picture
for?”

“I’m not sure.”

“For Melinda?”

“No. It … I was reminded of it when, well …”

So I explained it to Ardith. She looked at me a little unbelievingly, at first; then I could see she understood.

There were other photographs missing, too. We spent the next three hours going through each book. Eight more pages were blank. Gone was a series of pictures of me lying on a towel in the sun, and a series of me hamming it up on the living room carpet one hot summer evening, jeans on, shirt off, doing muscleman poses. As Ardith described the pictures to me, I remembered them. And I remembered that she had used certain filters and had dimmed the living room lights to produce shots that were forthrightly, harmlessly erotic.

“They were all of
you,
Terry. They took the ones that showed your body.”

When we were finished, we stood amid the stacks of boxes and piles of photo albums. I picked my way across to the window and slid it open. The warm breeze wafted in.

“Ardith, when was the break-in here? The burglary?”

“February the twenty-eighth. It was a Wednesday. Do you think that’s when … this happened?”

“It never did make sense, the way you described it. They break into a house that’s unoccupied, and steal some costume jewelry and clock radio? But they leave the TV, VCR, stereo and the pearls sitting out on the dresser? What the hell kind of burglary is that? Any thirteen-year-old kid would have enough sense to take some of the good stuff. It wasn’t burglars looking for loot. It was somebody looking for those photographs. So they could use them.”

“But who could possibly know that I had them? Know exactly where they were?”

I looked at her for a moment, then out the window. My old neighborhood stretched out before me, a huge tract of duplicate two-story town homes vanishing over a distant hilltop. Tan stucco. Red tile roofs. Then I turned back and looked at Ardith.

“Nobody knew, except you and me,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t steal my own pictures, Terry. Get that look off your face.”

“I know.”

“But who else knew?”

I shook my head. “They didn’t know until they found them. They bet on a hunch and the hunch was right. They stole a few trinkets to throw you off the trail. It worked.”