Within These Walls (5 page)

5

V
EE WASN’T STUPID.
She knew her mother was having an affair. Whoever that Kurt guy was, her parents had refused to talk out their problems. It’s what they had taught
her
to do—
use words, not fists—
but they were both hypocrites. And now Vee was on her way to some weird town in a state on the opposite side of the planet. Her summer was completely ruined. Her entire life was a total, hopeless, unrecoverable void of a train wreck. She’d never forgive her parents for this. Never get over it.
Never.

She had smelled the creep on her mother’s clothes—unfamiliar cologne clinging to her like a residual ghost. She saw “the other man” in the slump of her father’s shoulders, in the way her dad watched her mom from a distance. His sadness brimmed over so full it was a wonder it hadn’t drowned him completely.

Her parents thought she was weird because they were too busy screaming at each other to pay attention to her. It was her mom, mostly. Vee had heard her blame her dad for Vee “going goth” like it was a genetically transmitted disease. But had they stopped to ask the real reason for her metamorphosis, they would have discovered that all this commotion was not about them but about a boy named Tim.

Her friend Heidi had gotten Vee into melancholy music after hearing her brother Tim play it on his computer. Then Tim showed them the Ouija board he kept hidden at the back of his closet behind
a pair of old skateboarding decks, and Vee’s new obsession was born. She had been reluctant at first, but you don’t act like a chicken if you want to impress a guy like Tim.

It wasn’t that ghosts and death and alt-rock hadn’t interested Vee before she had fallen for her best friend’s brother, but Tim’s affinity for the darker side of things helped push her over the edge. She was vying for his attention, and winning the affection of a high school kid was a lot easier when she could talk about the same bands; when she could look the part rather than come off as a poseur. She’d gone so far as to show him a picture of her dad when he was a kid—the dark hair, the trench coat, the killer boots she’d spied in the back of her parents’ closet when she went snooping for money. Tim had taken one look at the high-school-aged Lucas Graham and thought it was awesome that Vee had been raised by a freak. When she dropped that her father wrote about serial killers and unsolved murders, she’d blown his mind and won a full-on “in” with Tim and his high school friends.

But that was all ruined now. And ironically, it was her dad’s fault. The man who had helped her win a plum spot among a group of older kids was the person who was stealing her away from them. And while Vee knew she’d be back at the end of the summer, eight weeks was an eternity. In eight weeks, Tim could discover a dozen new bands and find himself a girlfriend—a girl
way
cooler than her. Two months was plenty of time for Vee to lose her hard-earned place next to the boy she swore she was starting to love.

“Hey, Jeanie, get the map,” her dad urged.

Vee glared out the window for a moment longer, then grabbed her backpack out of the foot well. She rifled through it as the truck bounced along the highway toward the Pennsylvania border. Her dad had designated her as the official direction-keeper, and she had looked up their route on Google Maps while he had been busy pack
ing up the last of his stuff. His eyes had just about fallen out of his head when she told him it was a forty-two-hour trip. Pulling the printed directions out of a purple pocket folder decorated with black Sharpie swirls, she smoothed their route across her lap and wrinkled her nose at the crooked blue line that cut across its top.

“Eight hundred miles today,” he told her. “We have to keep to the schedule.”

“How long does eight hundred miles take?”

“Twelve hours at least.”

She groaned at his answer.

“It says forty hours on your map, but that’s regular car speed, kid. This truck doesn’t go that fast.”

“Forty-
two
hours,” Vee corrected, then slumped against the bench seat. By the time they’d reach their destination, Tim Steinway wouldn’t even remember her.
Virginia who?

She didn’t want to imagine some cool, dark-haired girl hanging off his arm when she finally got back home. Needing a distraction, she tossed the map printout onto the bench seat between them and gave her father a sidelong glance. “So, what did the guy you’re going to write about do?”

Her dad frowned at the steering wheel. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, but Vee wasn’t about to give him a choice. If she had to endure the possibility of losing Tim, had to deal with eight weeks of pure
exile,
she deserved to know what kind of a criminal was at the root of ruining her life.

6

K
EEPING THE SUBJECTS
of Lucas’s books a secret when Jeanie was younger had been easy, but the older she got, the more questions she had. Caroline used to tell her that Daddy wrote about monsters and ghosts. It was as accurate a description as any little girl would need. But Jeanie wasn’t so little anymore. Monsters and ghosts only repelled kids who were afraid of the dark, and Jeanie had proven that she liked the nighttime far more than she enjoyed the daylight.

“Did your mother bring that up?” It was the first thing that came to mind.

Caroline had always been good about not mentioning the specifics of his projects. Hell, she was the one who demanded he never breathe a word about his topics anywhere near their kid. Lucas had made a point of not keeping galley pages of his work anywhere in the house where Jeanie could find them. Any time he received a fresh shipment of new releases, he’d mail them out to friends and longtime readers. The leftovers ended up in the trunk, driven out to local libraries and cafés, all to spare his kid an accidental discovery. The copies he kept for himself were locked in a gun safe in the back of a bedroom closet. But now, with things between him and Caroline the way they were, it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover she had brought up Jeffrey Halcomb while packing up Jeanie’s things, if only to make his life more difficult than it was already going to be.

“I’m not an idiot,” Jeanie muttered. “I know what kind of things you write about. Killers and stuff.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s called Google,” Jeanie said flatly. Lucas held back a self-­satisfied smirk. He had once asked Caroline what she thought would happen when Jeanie decided to look him up on the Internet. She had waved a dismissive hand above her head, as though the thought of their daughter taking the time to research her own father was ludicrous.

“Anyway, I looked up your books on Amazon, and then I looked up the guys in your books on Wikipedia. They’re all, like, ax murderers. You didn’t think I’d ever find out?”

“Of course I knew you’d find out,” he said. “You’re a smart kid.”

It had been plain stupid of Caroline to think they could protect their daughter from the darkness of his interests forever. But before he could dwell on the fact that his little girl knew he made a living off of other people’s pain, his thoughts twisted toward an even scarier thought: if Jeanie had googled him, what else was she looking up?

“I’m hardly
a kid, Dad.”

He kept his attention on the road, but he could hear the eye roll in her voice.

“So, who is this guy you’re writing about? What did he do?” She pushed her hair behind her ears, waiting for the story while Lucas squinted at the highway.

Even when talking about his projects with Caroline, it had always been awkward. She’d been just as into The Cult and Dead Can Dance as he had, but she’d always found Lucas’s fascination with the dark and dangerous to be a bit too all encompassing. Like maybe he was harboring an inner psychopath that was itching to get out—a dark passenger à la Dexter Morgan.

His own parents considered his work deplorable, not that they had said as much, but Lucas knew it just the same. When he had started college, he had done so with the hope of becoming a criminal profiler. But his love for the written word had overridden his interest in police work. When he told his parents he wanted to be a writer in the middle of his sophomore year, Barbara and Harold Graham hit the roof.
A writer?
his dad had barked.
More like a piss-poor teacher getting shot at by his own ghetto students. Now
that’s
a future!
Lucas moved out several weeks later, finally tired of taking shit from them about what he wanted to do with his life. That had been nearly twenty years ago, but his pop still muttered contentions beneath his breath during every family gathering.

Writing about tragedy like that,
his father had stated the last time they had gotten together.
It’s no wonder your career is on the rocks. People don’t want to remember the folks that make our world ugly. They want to forget, and that’s why they aren’t buying your damn books
.

“Don’t you think I deserve to know?” Jeanie asked. “He’s the reason you’re moving, right? The reason you’re dragging me out here with you?”

“Dragging you?” Lucas didn’t like what that implied, as though she was his captive and he was the worst father in the world.

She shrugged, said nothing.

If he didn’t tell her, she’d only hate him more.

“Okay,” he said, squaring his shoulders and pushing back against his seat. “But not a word, all right? Your mother will kill me.”

“Like I even talk to her,” Jeanie murmured.

“Well, you
should
talk to her.”

“Whatever.” She dismissed the suggestion with a glance out the window. “You know she doesn’t even like me, right? I don’t know why she bothered having a kid.”

“That isn’t true.” The defense came tumbling out of him without so much as a beat of hesitation; his tone, sterner than he had intended. “Your mother loves you.”

“Oh yeah, then why . . .” Jeanie’s words trailed off. Rather than finishing her statement, she coiled her arms across her chest, pulled into herself, and went quiet.

She didn’t need to finish her sentence.
Then why would she run off with another guy? If she loved me, loved
us
, why would she be doing this
?
It was the very question he wanted to find the answer to, but dwelling on it would only make things worse. Lucas tightened his grip on the steering wheel and sucked in air.
Change the subject,
he thought.
Don’t talk about Caroline. You’ll end up saying something you’ll regret.

“Jeffrey Halcomb, he’s the bad guy,” Lucas began. “He’s the one I need to see.”

“You’re seeing him?” Jeanie perked beside him, her silence abandoned. “You mean he’s not dead?”

“Nope, he’s in prison. He manipulated people into following what he said, and in the end, he convinced them all to kill themselves. This guy has a special ability: the power of persuasion. He can make certain people do or believe almost anything.”

“But not all people?”

“No, not all people. You know how we all have different personalities?”

Jeanie nodded. “Some people are more gullible than others,” she said.

“That’s exactly right. Sometimes people are so vulnerable they’re willing to do or believe anything. All the person telling them to do or believe that thing has to do is promise them something they want.”

“Like money?”

“Well . . . more like love or companionship or a place to belong. He would look for people who were pretty desperate—runaways
who didn’t have a place to live, loners from broken families who were eager to have a friend. He . . . collected them. It took him years. And the longer these people stayed with him, the more they saw him as the key to their own happiness. They believed whatever he told them so that he wouldn’t abandon them, and eventually they began to seriously believe in the things he told them.”

“Like what?”

“Well, that’s the whole trick of it. Nobody really knows for sure.”

“What do you mean, nobody knows? He’s in prison, right?”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah, but he’s not talking.”

“Well, why don’t they just, like, squeeze it out of him or something?”

“Squeeze it out of him?” He cracked a faint smile. “Just give him the ol’ boot heel, huh?”

“He did something bad, right? So, why would he have the choice of not talking about it? How come he wouldn’t have to tell, like, a judge or the court or the cops or something?”

“Because he’s still got rights, kiddo.”

She didn’t like that answer. “Well,
that’s
dumb.”

“Dumb or not, that’s the way the justice system works. Just because you’re in prison doesn’t mean people can make you do what you don’t want to do.”

Jeanie remained silent for a long while, as though chewing on this newfound fact. Lucas couldn’t help the grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth when he caught her expression. She looked more serious than he’d ever seen her, her eyebrows pinched together and her mouth pressed into a terse line.

“So . . . how many people did he kill?” she finally asked.

“Ten.” That number wasn’t entirely accurate, but he didn’t want to discuss the details of infanticide with his twelve-year-old kid. “And he would argue that he didn’t kill them; they killed themselves.” Again,
not completely true. The way Lucas saw it, sacrifice was the same as murder, but many argued that Audra Snow had been a willing participant in Halcomb’s ritual. In Lucas’s mind, however, it didn’t matter whether Audra had offered her life to Jeff Halcomb or not.
He
had still been the one who had cut her open from pelvis to sternum.
He
had spilled her blood.
He
was responsible for taking that life, even if a valid argument could be made against the deaths of the others.

“People have been theorizing about what happened for thirty years now. Halcomb had a lot of followers, some that ended up losing interest or getting scared by the things he said. So when this happened, the suicides, some people decided to speak up. But Halcomb has never said a word about it. I mean,
nothing
.”

“And you’re going to go see him?”

Lucas’s stomach churned at Jeanie’s inquiry. The mere idea of meeting The Man made him sick with nerves. When he had torn open Halcomb’s letter on the sidewalk outside their house, he had hardly believed what he held in his hands. He had read it a good six or seven times before blasting into the house and calling his agent. For a true-crime writer, a
washed
-up
true-crime writer, that letter was a goddamn miracle. It was as though the sky had opened up and the Creator himself had said,
Fix your life already, dummy. Here’s a project anyone worth their salt would
kill
for and it’s all yours, Lucas; don’t fuck it up.

“Dad, what if he makes
you
do something?”

Lucas blinked, then gave Jeanie a sidelong glance. “What? No, he won’t.”

“But how do you know? Those people that died? They probably didn’t think they were gullible, either. And then they met
him
.”

“Except there’s a difference between those people and me, Jeanie. I know what he can do. It’s a magic trick. If you know how the trick is done, it doesn’t work, right?”

“I guess,” she muttered. “Like Criss Angel.”

Lucas’s mouth quirked up into a smirk, but his amusement was short-lived. No matter how he tried to reason it away, Jeanie’s concern was sound. Even John Cormick had voiced his doubts.

What makes you think this guy isn’t screwing with you, Lou? He hasn’t spoken to anyone about the case in three decades, and suddenly he wants
you
? No offense, but that’s weird, right? That’s like really fucking weird, Lucas. You’ve got to be careful, here.

But those doubts, the potential danger of it, hadn’t hit him until now. Halcomb still had the same power. Lucas knew the trick, and yet Halcomb had worked his magic without their ever meeting face-to-face.

You want my story, you live in my house.

Lucas hadn’t hesitated. He had simply picked up the phone and left a message with the front desk at Lambert Correctional.

Yes
, he had said.
Please let the inmate know that my answer is yes.