Within These Walls (29 page)

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. Good girl. Hush, now. Be calm.”

It was only then that she noticed Deacon, Noah, and Kenzie looming just outside the bedroom door. They had been listening, waiting. Avis blinked at them through tear-swollen eyes, but Jeff blocked her view a moment later.

His fingers caught the hem of her shirt. He tugged it up and over her head, then pushed her down onto the mattress as she stammered, the question of
why
poised on her lips. Her inquiry was silenced by the shake of Jeff’s head.
Shhh.

She squeezed her eyes shut as he tugged her jeans down over her hips. She could hear the boys shuffle into the room, could make out the sound of snaps and zippers hitting the floor. Not wanting any part of what was about to happen, she felt sick and exhausted and held back her tears.

Four pairs of hands groped at her flesh. Teeth dragged across her skin. Their fingernails scratched amid hushed, chant-like whispers she couldn’t make out because she was crying again. She sobbed as they pulled at her bra and underwear, tearing at them like aggressors, like animals, like nobody she’d have ever called her family at all.

43

D
ESPITE HIS OWN
trepidation about continuing to press Jeff for an interview, Lucas couldn’t let it go. He spent the next few days in a haze of research. The house alarm he couldn’t afford got installed. He called Lambert Correctional and bothered Lumpy Annie a good four or five times more to no avail. He tried to get back in Jeanie’s good graces, but most of the time, she wanted nothing to do with him. The only time she
did
talk to him was when she wanted pizza or takeout. Despite being tight on cash, he always obliged. At that point, meeting her culinary demands seemed like the least he could do. He offered to take her into Pier Pointe, to drop her off at the movies. She wasn’t interested. Echo stopped by to check up on them, but her visit degraded into Jeanie asking if Echo wanted to go up to her room to look at stuff on the Internet. Lucas didn’t like that, but he also didn’t like the idea of his daughter growing feral, either, so he allowed it. It seemed to him that, despite Jeanie’s previous insistence that he take her places, she was now resolved to staying locked up in her room. And so he remained in his study.

He couldn’t find much on the suicide Marty had mentioned during their lunch. In a short-and-sweet
Lambert Gazette
article, Lambert prison guard Stewart Hillstone was said to have been a “kind, gentle, churchgoing man” who, presumably, suffered a psychotic break after being laid off from his job. And while there was speculation
that Hillstone was axed because of the Schwartz incident, Lambert Correctional Facility claimed that the layoff was due to budget cuts. LCF stated that they didn’t hold Hillstone responsible for Schwartz’s demise. And while Lucas had no idea whether they pink-slipped Hillstone because Schwartz had been found choking on his own blood, he was sure anyone who knew enough about Halcomb would have come to the same conclusion: Halcomb had something to do with the deaths of both Schwartz and Hillstone. And yet, not a single investigator glanced Halcomb’s way. He was, after all, locked up and harmless. Locked up and
speechless,
actually, despite their goddamn deal.

Donna Hillstone’s obituary appeared in the
Gazette
a few days after her death. Stewart Hillstone didn’t receive a write-up at all; in the obit, Donna’s sister, Sandra Barnard, was noted as Donna’s only next of kin. The White Pages website listed her as living in Lambert. Lucas promptly entered the phone number into the contacts list on his phone. If he could get Sandra to talk to him, he could find out if Stewart had said anything suspicious in the weeks leading up to his and Donna’s deaths.

Lucas refused to believe there hadn’t been signs. Maybe Stewart had mentioned something about Halcomb’s philosophy or his own new beliefs. But the number was disconnected.
Typical.
The article had referred to Sandra as Miss, not Mrs. It failed to mention any nieces and nephews left to mourn their murdered aunt Donna. It was more than likely that Sandra had packed up her stuff and gotten the hell out of Lambert as soon as she took care of the unpleasant business of burying her only sibling.

He tried to get in touch with various soft leads. Trevor Donovan had only briefly known Jeff Halcomb when living in San Francisco. He had since been the leader of a peaceful protest group called California Change. As it turned out, California Change had disbanded in the mid-eighties and its members had scattered along the west
ern coast. There was no contact information for Trevor, no trail to follow.

Susanna Clausen-King, a wayward traveler who had been quoted in an article about Halcomb after his arrest, was even more of a ghost. As far as the Internet was concerned, she never existed, and even if she had, Lucas doubted she’d have been able to give him anything useful. It seemed that back in Jeff’s San Francisco days, he had still had a head on his shoulders. Or maybe that had been his game plan all along—play it cool, be charming. Reel in the kids and get heavy after they were good and committed.

What did surprise Lucas was the ringing of his phone. He nearly jumped out of his skin before snatching his cell off his desk and accepting the call. It was Mark.

“Um, hi?” Mark sounded unsure. “Are you alive out there? What the hell, man?”

Lucas pinched his eyebrows together, the bridge of his nose forming a deep-grooved V. “What?” He shook his head, as though Mark could see his confusion.

“
What
?
” Mark asked. “What do you
mean
what?”

Lucas was baffled. He leaned back in his seat and stared at the door of his study, perplexed. “Let’s start over,” he said. “Hello, Mark. How’ve you been?”

Mark didn’t respond for a long while. Lucas could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, as though drowning in his own dose of mystification. Finally, he spoke. “Well, fuck.
Hi, Lou!
I’ve been great, except for the fact that you haven’t been answering your phone or returning my calls for like over a week.”

“What?” Lucas leaned forward, pulled his phone away from his ear to look at the screen. Had he missed calls? He hadn’t heard his phone ring in days, but it was possible. Service was flaky out here. Half the time he was running on a single measly bar, and his
phone wasn’t the best. But
over a week
? “Wait, what are you
talking
about?”

“I’m talking about why the hell haven’t you called? I’ve left you like a dozen voice mails. This was my last try before getting in the car and driving my ass out there to make sure you haven’t . . .” He stalled. “Jesus, what’s going on? Is everything all right?”

But Lucas was hardly listening. He glanced at his phone again.
Over a week?
That was impossible. He’d lost track of time before, but this was beyond just forgetting the day of the week. Something about the date glowing on his cell’s LCD tripped a fuzzy thought inside his head. It was a familiar feeling, like walking into a room only to realize he didn’t know why he was there. That strange, disorienting sensation promised that he was forgetting something he swore he’d never let slip his mind. A birthday? An anniversary? Christ, had he promised to take Jeanie somewhere again?

“Lou?”

Logic told him he should have been as worried as Mark was. If he really had lost all that time, he needed to get himself to a doctor. Because how could it have been possible? Maybe something in his head had snapped. And yet, that date kept nagging at him.
So I lost a week, so what? I’ve been busy. Working. That’s what I came up here for.

“Lucas.”
Mark was growing impatient, but it was Lucas who was pushed over the edge by Mark’s agitation.

“Hey, man, why don’t you mind your own business?”

A long, drawn-out pause, then: “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Lucas said, gripping the phone tighter to his ear. “Why don’t you let me do what I came here to do?”

“Lou . . .”

“You know that every time you call me, you’re screwing up my rhythm?” he asked. “You know that every goddamn time you make this phone ring, I’m pulled out of my groove?”

Nothing.

“So, thanks for calling, Mark. Really,
thanks.
But maybe next time realize that if I’m not returning your voice mails or calling you back it’s because I’ve got more pressing shit to do than sit around and explain myself to you. Maybe
that
would be a good idea.”

Lucas ended the call before he could register what he’d just done. He’d never spoken to Mark that way in his life,
never
. There was a distant, nagging voice at the back of his mind that assured him that what had just happened wasn’t right, that there was something very off about the conversation that had just taken place. And perhaps he would have dwelled on that fact for longer than he did had it not been for that glowing, seemingly leering date on his phone.

What the hell am I forgetting?

He had never been good with keeping track of time. Even as a college student, the hardest question on the test was the month, day, and year. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember the significance of a day that was nearly over. Unless it could wait until tomorrow.

That was when it hit him.

He fumbled through the small mountain of paperwork that had accumulated on his desk, searching for a photocopy of Halcomb’s letter he knew was hidden there. He eventually found it, a date circled in red Sharpie. He had two days.

It was Jeff’s deadline.

Forty-eight hours left. That was it.

Holy shit.

His incessant calls to the prison for his interview had blurred together.

Jesus, what’s going on? Is everything all right?

Endless hours sitting in front of the computer had stealthily peeled the calendar pages away.

 . . . for like over a
week.

He couldn’t look away from the photocopy in his hand. He stared at the numbers circled in red, checked it against his phone, double-checked it against the date on the bottom right-hand corner of his laptop screen. But the date refused to change. Mark was right. It had been long,
too damn long.

That tiny, fading voice of logic managed to whisper:
How can you simply lose over a week of your life, Lou?

But the louder, more incessant voice of obsession drowned it out. Because somehow, inexplicably, Lucas only had a couple of days left to see the man who had compelled him to move to Pier Pointe; otherwise, Jeff would no longer be willing to talk, if he was ever willing at all.

Halcomb had shut him out. Betrayed him. Threatened Lucas’s project by refusing to see him. He had backed out on a deal that Lucas upheld without so much as a bat of an eye. The knowledge that he had somehow run out of time made him feel sick. But it was more than losing time—it was an assurance that, despite all his efforts, his career might now be over. His marriage sure as hell seemed to be. He was going to lose his kid, the girl that meant everything to him, and yet he still managed to see her for no more than what seemed like a few minutes a day.
When was the last time I saw her, anyway?
He had been too busy scrambling for a solution. This was Jeff Halcomb’s fault. He had put Lucas out.

His fingertips tingled. His entire body buzzed with nauseous anxiety. Mad butterflies smashed into his organs, desperate to beat their way through muscle and skin.

His attention wavered to one of Echo’s loaned photographs. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb was alone. He sat cross-legged on what appeared to be a bed of pine needles.
There were trees at Jeff’s back. He was cupping something in his hands, too out of focus to make out; pos
sibly a baby bird or squirrel. But it made no difference; his smile was too disarming to focus on the contents of his palms. Jeffrey Halcomb had, in his heyday, been what any woman would have considered beautiful. Dark waves of hair stopped just beyond his shoulders. His face was long and angular, strikingly attractive—a face that drew in runaways, eyes that promised a better future filled with acceptance and understanding. But goddamn, it was that smile that won them over. Something about it radiated peace and love and all the stuff an angry kid leaving their home life behind would want. Jeffrey Halcomb looked positively radiant, a hippie transplant stuck in the early eighties.

Audra Snow, Laura Morgan, even dead-eyed girls like Chloe Sears—they all wanted to be whatever it was Jeff had tucked away in his hands. They wanted to be that baby bird, that tiny woodland creature. They wanted Jeff Halcomb to be their everything, and in the end, that’s exactly what he had become.

Lucas pushed the photograph beneath his stack of papers, not wanting to look at it anymore.
Why did I speak to Mark that way?
He had to call him back to apologize. He grabbed his phone, but rather than calling Mark back, he found himself speed-dialing Lambert Correctional Facility long after visiting hours were over. When Lumpy Annie answered the line, Lucas nearly sighed with relief at the sound of her voice. At least she was familiar. Maybe, finally, he’d stumble into a bit of luck—by some miracle, on his last attempt, Lumpy Annie would say,
Wow
, gee, Mr. Graham, I sure am glad you called, because inmate number 881978 suddenly changed his mind about that visitation thing. You should come on down first thing in the morning and do that interview you’ve been harassing us about.

But from the tone of her recognition, he doubted that was the case.

“Oh,
hi,
Mr. Graham,” she said, no longer needing an introduction.

“Hi,” he said, embarrassed by the fact that this prison receptionist had become somewhat of a long-distance acquaintance. “Sorry, I just had to check one more time. You understand . . .”

Lumpy Annie remained quiet for a long moment, then exhaled a breath into the receiver. “Mr. Graham, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

“He’s still not taking visitors,” Lucas said. “I guess that isn’t much of a surprise.”

“Not quite,” she said. “It’s a bit more serious than that.”

“How so?”

“Mr. Graham, the inmate . . .” She paused, backtracked. “Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s no longer with us.”

“He was transferred?” That didn’t make any sense. Halcomb had been at Lambert since his conviction. If there had been any plans of transferring him from one facility to another, Lucas would have known about it.

“I guess you can say that,” she said. “He’s dead, Mr. Graham.”

Lucas lost his breath.

“He killed himself in his cell earlier today. His body is with the medical examiner. So I guess you can stop calling here.”

A strange feeling roiled around in his guts, one that suggested far more empathy than he cared to feel for a brainwasher, a conspirator, a murderer. Halcomb was
dea
d
? How could that be? A man like him didn’t just simply end himself like . . . like Hillstone. Like Schwartz. Like January Moore. Like the lost and lonely of Pier Pointe, 1983.

“I don’t—”
Understand.
The final word was lost among the dimness of his study, cut off as his gaze shifted to the cross on his desk, the artifact he’d been fiddling with during his research, tapping against his blotter to an unheard tune.
Schwartz.
Lucas leaned back in his seat, repelled by the cross’s very presence, suddenly sure that Jeff had gone the same way his inmate neighbor had. Someone
had left that cross for Lucas with Lumpy Annie. Someone had also smuggled one in just like it and passed it on to Schwartz. How did a man kill himself in a maximum-security cell? Someone had provided Jeff with a weapon . . . someone from the outside.