Within These Walls (11 page)

She finished in the bathroom and slapped the light switch. As she crossed into the living room, her excitement momentarily blurred her fear of the dark. But the sudden barrage of thoughts tumbled to a stuttering stop when she noticed something off. The carpet felt weird beneath her feet. She didn’t remember it being this fluffy before. Peering at it through the faint glow of moonlight, she couldn’t quite make out what was different. And while she wanted to ignore
it and get back to her room, she squatted midstep to draw her fingers across the ground.

It felt as though thousands of inch-long strands of yarn made up the rug. It reminded her of the vintage Rainbow Brite doll her dad had gotten her for one of her birthdays years earlier. Spurred on by her father’s love for all things eighties, she had been on a retro cartoon kick. Thick yellow string had made up Rainbow’s head of hair, but the carpet beneath her feet was
supposed
to be a low-pile beige.

She tried to remember where she and her dad had dropped the few rugs they had brought from home, tried to remember if they even
had
a rug that felt the way the carpet felt now. Maybe it was one of the things her dad had scored on sale? But before she could figure it out, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. There, in the faint iridescence of night, their overstuffed leather couch was gone. So was the old armchair her mother had surrendered to “the cause,” and the glass-top coffee table her dad had bought off of a neighbor was missing too. Even the entertainment center and their flat-screen TV—the one thing her dad had refused to budge on when it came to material possessions. All of it was replaced by stuff she’d never seen before.

An ugly couch with a blanket thrown over the back of it stood where the leather sofa should have been, its orange-and-brown plaid pattern marking it as not their own. A worse-for-wear beanbag chair sat next to it, and a kind of TV she’d never seen before stood against the wall. It looked like it was stuck in some sort of stubby-legged wooden cabinet with dials on the side. A woven tapestry hung on the wall above it. It, like the carpet, looked as though it was made of yarn. The knotted strings displayed a meticulously constructed bouquet of flowers. Little wooden beads hung from the ends of the weird artwork, tapping against the wall, pushed by a fan that didn’t exist.

Vee blinked a few times, but the weird furniture refused to go
away. She shot a look across the living room toward the kitchen. She couldn’t see it from where she was standing, but she was almost positive that it would be just as foreign to her as the stuff that had taken over the living room.

Shaking her head, she decided that this had to be one of those strange waking dreams her dad had a book about—something about feeling completely awake despite being in a totally different state of mind. Vee hadn’t understood a word of what she had read, but she now realized that this must have been what “lucid” meant. A sense of parallel reality, where you know where you are, but aren’t where you should be.
It’s just a dream
, she thought.
Just your imagination. Just the headache twisting up your thoughts.
But the steady tap-tap-tapping of wooden beads promised that she was awake.

And then there was the shadow figure in the corner, still as marble and dark as midnight. The curve of a shoulder. The delicate line of an arm.

It wasn’t real. She
had
to be hallucinating. But her mind screamed,
It’s the girl!

She fell into a run. Grabbing the stair banister, she bolted up the steps, winded by the time she reached the landing. The upstairs hallway looked different too. The photos she had hung along the wall were gone, replaced with cheap painted landscapes in wooden frames.

“Dad!” The word left her throat in a sudden burst. She nearly tripped over her feet as she ran for his door and burst into the room. Her father bolted upright in bed. He fumbled with a bedside lamp, his eyes wide when it finally illuminated his face. “Dad, I . . .”
I think all our stuff is gone, replaced by other stuff. And there’s a person . . .
It was stupid. Ridiculous. Crazy and she knew it.

“What?” Her dad looked as freaked out as she felt. His hair was wild with sleep. His face pulled tight with alarm.

“My head.” It was the first thing that came to mind. “It still hurts.”

He rubbed a hand across his face.

“What if I have a brain aneurysm?” she asked, predicting his reaction before it came.

He leveled his gaze on her, his worry melting into a knowing sort of stare. “Oh, Jeanie. Are you going on that website again?”

She didn’t reply.

“Jeanie . . . I promise, you don’t have a brain aneurysm.”

Except maybe she did. Maybe that was why she’d been experiencing everything since what she saw in the bathroom. It was one thing to think that she’d seen a ghost, but altogether another to see an entire room rearranged. Perhaps her brain was misfiring. The knock she’d taken had jostled something loose.

“Here,” he said, pulling open the bedside table drawer. He lifted out a bottle of Tylenol and shook it at her like a rattle. She dragged her feet along the rug as she approached, held out her hand as he dropped two tablets into her palm.

“But what if you’re wrong?” she asked, staring at the pills. “What if I die in my sleep?”

He watched her for a long while before tossing aside his sheets. “Okay,” he said. “Get dressed.”

“What? Why?” She took a few steps away from his bed.

“Because you’re right,” he said. “I should have taken you to the hospital right off the bat.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, forget it. I’m fine.”

“Except you’re worried about dying? Work with me here, kid—what is it that you want me to do?”

“Just forget it,” she said again. “Really, Dad. It went away earlier. If it was an aneurysm, it wouldn’t have gone away with pills, but it did, which means I’m okay. I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s just a headache, that’s all.”

He frowned at her.

“Sorry for waking you up,” she murmured, closing her fingers around the medicine in her hand. She turned toward his door, and for a split second she hoped he’d tell her to sleep in his room, just in case. But he didn’t. And while she reasoned that he hadn’t offered because she was too old for that sort of babying, she couldn’t help but feel a flash of resentment as she sulked out of the room.

She wandered down the hall that was now devoid of the cheap landscapes she had seen hanging only minutes before. And while she clearly remembered leaving her bedroom door open, it was closed again. She hesitated, forcing herself to step inside despite what may have awaited her.

The room was just the way she left it. Nothing out of the ordinary. And while she should have felt comforted by its familiarity, all she wanted to do was cry.

Because she wasn’t crazy.

The girl in the mirror
had
been there. That shadow downstairs had probably been her. The house beyond her bedroom door
had
been all wrong. If there was nothing off with her head, what she’d seen had been real.

14

S
ELMA ARRIVED AT
the house bright and early the next day, a giant purse hanging off one shoulder and a shopping bag full of leftovers heavy in her right hand. “Hey. Figured you guys would want food,” she told Lucas when he opened the door. “I made way too much for just me and Mark. And I brought over a bunch of Blu-rays. I wasn’t sure if you guys got around to unpacking your stuff yet, so . . .” She smiled, handed him the bag, and brushed her dark Zooey Deschanel bangs away from her eyes.

“Thanks.” Lucas stepped aside to let her in. “Sorry about last night. Jeanie ended up with a pretty wicked headache. I nearly took her to the ER.”

“Is she okay?”

“I think so. Though, if she still has a headache today I’m taking her to the clinic whether she wants to go or not.”

“Mark told me about what happened,” Selma said. “She got lucky. It could have been a lot worse.” She offered him a look of consolation, then glanced around her surroundings. “Wow, Mark wasn’t kidding when he said this place is dated.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit Partridge Family.”

“But it’s charming,” she countered, giving him a red-lipped smile. “I like it. It’s got this cool fifties Americana thing going on, and if anyone loves the fifties . . .” She posed for half a second, letting him get an eyeful of her typical rockabilly style.

Lucas chuckled and led her into the kitchen. She let her eyes sweep the place before she shrugged off her purse—which looked like a small version of a black-and-white bowling bag—and set it on the island.

“Thanks for doing this,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention it.” She waved away his gratitude.

“No, I want to mention it. It’s a long drive, and we stood you up last night. I feel bad about it.”

An easy shrug rolled off Selma’s shoulders. “Not on purpose. Besides, this gives me an excuse to get out onto the coast. It’ll be nice to spend a day out of the city.”

“And like I said,” Lucas continued. “If you want to stay here every now and again, we’ve got the room. I’ve got an air mattress. You can sleep in the master, I’ll sleep on that.”

She lifted a hand as if to tell him not to consider it. “If I
do
stay, the blow-up would be fine. I’m no princess. I just like Mark to think that I’m one.” She winked. “Anyway, you should get going. Isn’t it, like, a two-hour drive?”

Lucas glanced at his watch and nodded. “In-processing is between eleven thirty and noon, so I should be fine.” He patted down his pockets, making sure he had his wallet and phone. “You’ll call me if you need anything . . .”

“I still think it’s crazy, you interacting with this guy,” Selma said. “Doesn’t it freak you out?”

“Why would it freak me out? He’s locked up.”

“Yeah, but . . .” She scrunched up her nose at a thought. “He’s just, you know . . .”

“I know. But that’s why people read this stuff. You get all the details from the safety of your own home.” He grabbed his keys off the counter only to stare at the plastic U-Haul emblem attached to them.
Oh, shit!
The Maxima was sitting somewhere in Seattle. He
had meant to pick it up last night while returning the rental truck, but then the thing happened with Jeanie. And then he ended up on the phone with the prison and spent the rest of the day frantically putting together interview questions. The car had completely slipped his mind. “I am such a fucking idiot,” he muttered to himself. An extra day with the truck would cost him. An extra few hundred miles on the odometer would cost him even more.

Selma held her keys aloft, dangling them from a well-manicured set of nails.

“No.” Lucas shook his head. It was his oversight. He’d pay the extra fee if he had to. But Selma made a face at him, the kind Caroline used to show when he was turning something small into a big deal. “Just go. It’s rude to be late, even if your date is sitting in a supermax.”

He hesitated, still considering a refusal. But if he didn’t make it to Lambert on time, he’d miss his appointment, and that would be a hell of a lot worse than a few rental truck fees. He grimaced, squinted, and finally grabbed the keys from her hand.

“I’ll fill her up,” he promised.

“You better,” she said with a grin. “Have fun in prison.”

Lucas flashed her a goofy smile and bounded out of the house.

15

T
HE SUPERMAX PRISON
was tucked into the far corner of a town called Lambert, a small place with a main drag, a handful of stoplights, and—Lucas guessed—a population that was either employed by Walmart, McDonald’s, or Washington State’s Department of Corrections. He sat in Selma’s Camry with the window rolled down, her double-cherry air freshener having spurred on a mild headache just behind his eyes. Studying the notes and questions he’d scribbled onto a yellow legal pad, he felt more nervous than he thought possible.
Might have to visit the bathroom before the interview,
he thought.
Or puke up my breakfast to be able to think straight.

He had felt the same way when Jeff Halcomb’s letter had arrived in his mailbox, forwarded by his former publisher to his home address. He hadn’t heard from St. Martin’s Press in years. When he spotted their emblem on the corner of an envelope among a pile of bills, he had done a double take. His mind reeled at the possibility; did they want him back? Had they realized, after so many years of separation, that they had made a mistake by letting him go? Wouldn’t they have called if that were the case? He’d shoved the rest of the mail back in the box before tearing into the envelope, but rather than his old editor apologizing for not renewing Lucas’s contract, there was a smaller envelope inside marked “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” in block letters. This one sported a prison mailroom return address.

Receiving a handwritten letter from Jeffrey Halcomb had been one of the most surreal experiences of Lucas’s life. He had read it, then read it again, then ran inside to show Caroline only to stop short of the front door. It was the demand that Lucas move into the house on Montlake Road that made him hesitate. If Caroline was privy to that particular ultimatum, the project would be over before it ever had a chance to begin. Moving into the Montlake house was both a weird command and a crazy idea. But just
holding
that letter in his hands gave him such a pang of inspired hope for the future that it seemed just as insane to refuse Halcomb’s request as it did to oblige it.

Now drawing that letter out from his bag, Lucas pulled in a breath as he reread the correspondence he had put to memory weeks before.
I just don’t know,
John had said.
In all my years in the business, I haven’t ever had a client receive an offer like this. It feels off, Lou. It feels strange.
Bullshit, it felt lucky. It felt like Lucas Graham had just won the true-crime lottery. All he needed to do was collect.

He shoved his legal pad into his messenger bag, closed his eyes, and took a moment to steady his nerves. Coming off as anxious or unsure around a master manipulator wasn’t the best idea. He needed to control the situation, and insecurity wouldn’t cut it. “You are Lucas Graham,” he murmured. “You can do anything.” But it rang hollow, as if it was a hard sell.

Halcomb had already convinced Lucas to move to Pier Pointe. It had taken no effort. If Lucas said no, Halcomb would go somewhere else. It didn’t matter if he claimed to be a fan of Lucas’s work. If Lucas didn’t want the gig, a thousand other writers would clamor at the opportunity. Lucas could already see it, walking by the display window of a Barnes & Noble, some other writer’s book about the Halcomb case stacked halfway up to the ceiling. Cardboard displays toting it as the most incredible read since some guy had discovered
the Zodiac Killer had been his biological dad. And that’s where Lucas would stay—
outside
the book store—exiled first by his wife, then by his daughter, and finally by his choice to not take a chance. Doomed by his decision to play it safe.

The prospect of talking to a figure that represented everything that was wrong with the world was dazzling. Jeffrey Halcomb’s trial had dominated the airwaves for most of ’83 and the first quarter of ’84. Unlike Charles Manson, who talked to anyone who’d listen, the world had largely forgotten about Halcomb because he had chosen steadfast silence. And unlike Manson, who insisted that he was innocent, Halcomb never made that claim. Judging by the trial footage, it appeared that Jeffrey Halcomb was completely satisfied with having convinced eight young Americans to take their own lives.

And then there was Audra Snow and her baby. There were the deaths of Richard and Claire Stephenson, almost certainly Halcomb’s doing, despite the prosecution not having enough evidence to convict. Other names had come up during Halcomb’s trial as well, names of drifters that had been found across various western states. Someone had killed a young San Luis Obispo family in their backyard in the late summer of ’81. Knifed just before Christmas of that same year, an elderly couple was found dead in their Fort Bragg home. A midtwenties drifter was discovered naked and hog-tied along a hiking trail just outside of Tillamook. All the drifter’s possessions—including his clothes—had been stolen. If he hadn’t bled to death, he would have frozen during that first week of January 1982. All instances placed Halcomb in or around Pier Pointe during the Stephenson kill.

But despite the jury’s suspicions and the prosecutor’s insistence, none of the other cases stuck. If there were any witnesses to the Stephenson case, they had died in the house on Montlake Road and Halcomb certainly wasn’t going to fess up. Not that writers hadn’t
begged for interviews. Jeffrey Halcomb had been as in demand as Charlie for the first few years of his incarceration. Reporters had clamored for a chance to talk to the silent cult leader for nearly a decade, but Jeff refused. Interest eventually waned. As far as Lucas knew, this was the first time Halcomb had agreed to an interview since he’d been locked up.

His first stop was the visitor’s desk, manned by a stout woman sporting a light brown Annie Warbucks fro. He signed in, gave the woman behind the counter his ID, and fished out of his bag the media release that the prison had mailed him weeks before.

“You with the news?” she asked.

Lucas shook his head. He imagined that she didn’t break five feet tall standing up. Her name tag was missing, but it was probably Phyllis or Florence or Agatha—the kind of moniker that appeared on the endangered names list.

Observe the last existing Maude in her natural habitat.

“I’m a writer,” he said, giving the lumpy Annie Warbucks look-alike a smile.

She eyed him in a suspicious sort of way, as though not liking his face. “For the news?”

“No. True crime. I’m an author.”

She looked back down at his license, and for a split second he could see her searching her memory for why his name sounded so familiar. It seemed a natural fit. She worked at a prison. True crime was right up Lumpy Annie’s alley. Maybe she had been one of the millions of readers who had bought
Bloodthirsty Times
a dozen years ago. She may have watched him stumble through an interview on
Good Morning America
while having her morning cup of coffee.

Nope.

She slid his ID and credentials back to him and nodded toward the waiting area. “Have a seat, Mr. Graham. Ten minutes till
in-­processing. Then you go through security. And no cell phones, even for media. You leave it at the checkpoint.
No
exceptions, so don’t even ask.”

“All righty.” He turned toward the waiting room, took a seat in a scuffed hard plastic chair that reminded him of grade school, and dug through his bag to make sure he had everything in order. He tried to keep himself from getting cold feet by studying the folks waiting to be let in for visitation. An elderly woman sat across the room, clutching her purse with talon-like fingers of sinew and bone. When she noticed Lucas watching her, she narrowed her eyes at him and pulled her purse closer to her chest.
And yet she’s brave enough to visit her convict son in supermax,
he mused.

My son is
not
a convict,
he imagined her squawk back at him.
My boy has been wrongfully accused!
Because wasn’t that always the case?

He looked away from her angry face and focused on a young woman rocking a baby in its car seat with her foot. She was reading a tattered old paperback, probably something she’d picked up used for a dime at the local Goodwill. But it was her posture that fascinated him most. So casual, as though she’d been to Lambert Correctional every week for as long as her baby had been alive; maybe six or seven months before it had ever been born.

Ten minutes turned into twenty. Lucas was eventually ushered into a room with small lockers situated behind a waist-high counter. The prison guard peered at him as Lucas removed all items from his pockets—keys, cell phone, loose change—and slid them across the surface to be stored. His messenger bag went in as well, but the guard allowed him to keep his yellow legal pad of notes and a handheld digital voice recorder to conduct his interview. He wasn’t allowed to bring a pen. Lucas had seen enough prison movies to not question why.

The guard patted him down, then wanded him for good measure
before motioning for him to step over to the barred door on the opposite wall. A second officer met him on the other side of the bars before a loud buzzer screamed and the door slid open.

The guard who greeted him inside the belly of the prison wore a name badge that read “J E MORALES.” He was a tall, lanky man, maybe in his early thirties, with mocha-colored skin and a faint limp on his left. His smile was wide, almost triumphant.

“Mr. Graham? It’s a real honor,” he said, grabbing Lucas’s hand. “I read your book, the one about Ramirez?” It was always the one about Ramirez. “Man, it was good. You really captured the, uh . . . what’s the word . . .” He waved a hand above his head, trying to summon the right term. “The
atmosphere
,” he said, snapping his fingers at his own success. “I was born and raised in L.A. just outside of Monterey Park, where he shot that girl and attacked that old couple, you know?”

On top of killing Tsai-Lian “Veronica” Yu and assaulting and murdering one of the Dois, Richard Ramirez had also beaten a sixty-­one-year-old woman to death in that same part of town. Lucas didn’t bother to bring up the omission. “That was one of the hardest hit areas,” he agreed.

“I was just a kid,” Morales said. “My parents were shitting bricks. Ramirez was one of the reasons I decided to become a cop.” He paused, as if going back to the memory of growing up in a terrorized Los Angeles, then shook his head. “I worked the beat for a while, but my mom was always waiting for a call, you know? Waiting for
el segador
 . . .” He paused. “You speak Spanish?”

“Not really,” Lucas said.

“That means ‘the reaper,’ ” he said. “She was always crossing herself, praying for me on Sundays, counting off her rosary beads so I wouldn’t get shot in some alley in El Este.”

Lucas had spent enough time in California to be familiar with El Este—East L.A.

“It was mostly just robberies and car theft, lots of domestic disturbances . . . but it was rough, you know? My mom couldn’t handle what I did too good, so I applied as a guard at San Quentin. She wasn’t too happy about
that,
either, it being so far from home and all, but in her eyes, it was better than me being out on the streets.”

Lucas gave the chatty guard a nod. He appreciated the distraction. A silent walk into the bowels of Lambert Correctional would have only made Lucas sick with anxiety. It was a strange coincidence to run into such an avid fan, but he was thankful. Scared that the guy would suddenly stop talking and Lucas would be left to wrestle with his own self-doubt, he kept the conversation rolling.

“San Quentin,” he said. “You know that’s where—”

“Where they had Ramirez locked up? Yeah, man, I know. Everyone knew. I was working general population, so I was never in the same unit as him, but I knew he was there. I tried to get in to see him, but you know how it is, rules and regulations and all that. It was weird when he died.”

“Weird how?”

“Like, just
weird
,” Morales said. “You felt good that this guy was gone, right? But you felt bad because you aren’t supposed to feel good about people going to the other side.”

“Did you call your mom when it happened?”

Morales’s face lit up at the inquiry. “Oh, hell yeah, I did,” he said with a laugh. “I called her that same day and told her,
Mama, el monstruo está muerto
and she started doing Hail Marys right there on the phone. She’s read your book, too. I recommended it.” He paused, smiled apologetically. “She hated it. Sorry, man.”

Lucas bit back a laugh. “Great. Maybe I’ll send her my next one as a mea culpa.”

“A what?”

“An apology.”

“So, you don’t speak Spanish but you speak Latin?” Morales asked.

“No.” Lucas chuckled. “Just that and a few other things. Alibi. Alter ego. Stuff like that.”

“ ‘Alter ego’ is Latin?”

“Yep.”

“Huh.” Morales looked mystified. “Then I guess I speak Latin, too. Man, it’s good to meet you!” He beamed again, smacked Lucas on the back like a lifelong pal. “I lived in L.A. all my life, but I’ve never met a real-life celebrity before.”

Celebrity.
Lucas nearly scoffed at that, but instead, he bit his tongue and offered the overly eager guard a smile.

The pair arrived at a second set of bars. There was a small office to the left, thick glass separating them from the guard inside. Morales gave the guy a nod and waited. The buzzer sounded, the bars slid aside, and they continued their walk.

“So, you tried to get to Ramirez; what about Jeffrey Halcomb?” Lucas asked. “Have you met him?”

Morales shrugged, as if suddenly reluctant to talk. “Yeah, I mean, it’s part of the job. He’s okay. Quiet, but I’m sure you know that, right? Him not giving anyone interviews or anything. He doesn’t cause too much trouble.”

“You know about his refusing interviews?” Lucas asked. It was interesting that a guard would be privy to that sort of information. How well did Morales know Halcomb? “Are you on one-on-one terms with him?”

Morales squinted, uncomfortable with the question. For a moment, Lucas was sure he wasn’t going to get a reply. Eventually, Morales shook his head and spoke. “Nah, man. I mean, the guys in here, some of them are good people, you know?”