THE SUN WAS BARELY UP when my father backed his car out of the driveway and turned away from the inviting Vermont home. I shifted my car into drive and coasted from the curb. I was following my father again, but this time my presence was welcomed. We were headed home to confront Linda. It was only Monday, and he was leaving Charlie for the week. He was choosing us in that moment, and it wasn’t lost on me.
I had no idea what kind of Linda we were going to find. My last unexpected visit had found Linda hammered beyond recognition, lying in her own puke, but the night before she had been an over-the-top Stepford wife. Which one was real? Probably neither.
I hadn’t seen a soul for the last few miles, and as we approached the house, I longed for a neighbor walking the dog or a kid on a bike. I was anxious and uncomfortable, and the postapocalyptic vibe wasn’t helping. I got out of the car and slammed the door before our footsteps became the only noise in earshot.
I followed my father in through the garage. He didn’t speak. I could tell from his frigid mannerisms that he was back in his disguise. I would have to return to Vermont if I wanted to see the other Dad again.
The kitchen was clean and barren. The drawn curtains didn’t let either one of us forget we were unexpected guests. We moved silently through the house. I contemplated bumping into something to let a sound ring out, announcing our presence, but I followed my father’s lead. I wanted Linda to come running down the stairs. I didn’t want to find her.
We climbed the stairs. He knew where he was going, and I had no reason to argue.
I felt like I no longer knew a single person in my life. Everything was a lie. Everything was an act. I craved seeing Linda come out of the bathroom, hair and makeup perfect, yelling at us for tracking dirt onto the stairs and complaining what an inconvenience it was to have the carpet guys come to the house even though she never had anything better to do. I hated that Linda, but it was the Linda I had always known and understood how to deal with. I wanted that Linda.
The door to the bedroom my father shared with Linda in what I can only imagine was a cold, frictionless bed was closed. He opened it and stepped through. I followed, empowered to consider myself welcome inside.
The bed was made and empty. We both stood there a moment, staring at the bed like she would manifest if we looked hard enough. My father broke first and headed toward the bathroom. An idea came to me and I backed out of the room.
Jenny’s door was closed to the point I couldn’t see in, but not shoved the extra inch to catch the handle. I placed my right hand against the door, eye level in an unconscious effort to obstruct what I was about to see. I pushed forward and stepped into a room I had now been in more times since her death than in the whole year before.
Linda looked like a bag of bones. Only a faint rise and fall in her chest kept me from screaming. She was on her back, on top of Jenny’s bed, one arm above her head, one tucked behind her. Her head hung to the side in a position someone in a right state of mind would never choose.
“Dad,” I said somewhere above a whisper. I heard him coming from the other room, but I kept my eyes on Linda, panicking in between each of her labored breaths. There were pills. It wasn’t dramatic like in the movies, just one pill bottle on the nightstand. It wasn’t even knocked over, but I knew it was empty.
My father pushed the door farther to accommodate his larger body as he entered. He stopped behind me, looking over my shoulder at his wife. After a brief pause, he pushed me aside and ran to her. He knelt down and touched her arm.
“Linda,” he said, quietly at first. She didn’t react. He was being too gentle. “Linda …” he tried again, this time shaking her shoulder and causing her head to bounce a bit against the pillow. She moaned and flipped her face away from him.
The moan awakened something in my father, and he seized her other shoulder. He yanked her up and down, grasping for consciousness. “Linda, wake up! Linda!”
She moaned again as she moved her head back and forth, trying to make him stop, but it was like her head weighed a hundred pounds.
He released her shoulders and put his hand around her jaw, holding her in place. He was close to her face now, within inches. “Linda, you need to wake up. What do you know about Jenny? What happened that night?”
Linda groaned from somewhere deep inside that caused me to grimace and my father to release her and fall back onto his heels. She rolled to her side, revealing the hidden hand clutching Jenny’s pigtails.
I whipped my face toward the back of my father’s head and waited for him to turn his eyes to me. We communicated without speaking; we had discovered something horrible.
Linda’s eyes fluttered open. Then closed. Then open again, struggling to stay that way. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Are those Jenny’s?” my father asked, coming off his heels a bit.
“I attacked her,” Linda mumbled like her tongue was too big for her mouth. “I hit her and I cut her hair off … She ran away.”
Her eyes closed and her body went limp. My father attempted to shake her awake again, but she just flopped around like a doll. Those were the only words we were going to get from her in that room.
“Call 9-1-1,” he said, and I pulled my phone from my pocket. This was going to be ugly. Did she do something? Did I do something? What about Gil?
I TEXTED BRANDON on the way to the hospital. There was too much to talk about and I didn’t want to do it over the phone. By the time I parked and got inside, they had wheeled her off and left my dad in the waiting room. He was typing like mad on his phone, and I now knew that what I used to think were work e-mails were in fact texts to Charlie. I wondered how many times I was furious with him for dealing with work when in reality he was talking to his true love. Christmas mornings, birthdays, every other ordinary day?
I slunk into the seat next to him, and he stopped typing.
“She’s going to be fine. They’re letting her sleep it off,” he said without eye contact. Then we sat in silence. He wasn’t on his phone; it was a real, mutual silence.
“I won’t tell,” I said so he wouldn’t have to ask.
My father shook his head. He was embarrassed, which I loved.
“It wasn’t like it is now,” he said. “I sacrificed what I wanted so that you and then Jenny could have a normal life.”
“Are you serious? You definitely didn’t do this for me or Jenny. You don’t even really like us.”
“Is that what you think?” He looked up at me.
“Don’t ask that like I’m overreacting,” I said, trying my best to keep a calm tone.
“We would have been ostracized. School would have been a nightmare for you.”
“School was a nightmare because my mom fucking killed herself,” I threw back at him.
His head fell.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t really sorry; at least, I don’t think I was.
“Do you blame me now? For Jenny?” he asked, begging me to let him off the hook.
“Hard to tell. I don’t know what happened to her. I’ll reserve blame for when we have answers,” I said, jaded to the max.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Virginia, and I want you to know I’m sorry. Every time I thought about telling someone, the fear was too much. After your mother—” He closed his eyes for a beat. “Logically, it made sense to tell the truth, but when my body was physically ill from the thought of it, I convinced myself it must be wrong and then I shut it out. I didn’t weigh the pros and cons, I just tuned it out.” He spewed vulnerability in his same dry, weighted tone. I guess that’s just how he sounded all the time, his disguise so ingrained into who he was now, so trained to become cold and distant whenever he left Vermont.
My defenses were skyrocketing. I was thrilled about this other Dad, but I was too exhausted to rely on my judgment that it was for real. It was better not to risk it. When in doubt about matters of the heart, best to think about murder, facts, murder facts. “Do you think Linda killed her?” I asked. “Is it possible? I mean, anything is possible, but is it reasonable?”
He sighed, accepting I wasn’t ready to forgive him. “I hope not. I really hope not. She said Jenny ran away.”
When he glanced back at his phone, I welcomed the opportunity for a break.
I stood up like I wanted to stretch my legs and really just moved to another seat on the opposite side of the waiting room. I sat still, alone with my thoughts with no way to act on them. It kept coming back to the rape. Anyone could have killed her, but Linda didn’t rape her. I didn’t rape her. I realized in that moment I was relieved that Jenny had been raped. If she hadn’t been, would I actually entertain the idea I was involved? No. I had to believe in myself. I had no reason to kill her. If I wanted her dead, it would have been back when she was Little Miss Perfect. It made no sense now. A drunken phone call. That was it. It had to be.
“Virginia,” Brandon snapped me out of my head.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, standing up and letting him hug me.
“Of course, what happened?”
“I don’t know. We came home and found her passed out in Jenny’s bed. She said a few words, but she was definitely messed up. She’s fine, though.”
Brandon took a seat next to me, and we both stared out into the waiting room. My father hadn’t even looked up from his phone enough to notice Brandon was there.
“What were you doing with your dad? I thought you hated him.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, hoping he would drop it.
He turned in his chair to face me. I kept my face forward, sneaking glimpses of him in my periphery that begged him to turn away. “I know something happened in New York. I don’t know what, and you don’t have to tell me, but you can if you want.”
“Just family stuff,” I said.
It wasn’t my secret to share. Not with the detective, even if I was sleeping with him. He would think the same things I did. The lying, the cheating—better to just keep him focused on finding Gil. We were a group of wretched people, it turned out, but Gil was still the most likely suspect. Gil, the missing pedophile.
“Any news on Gil?”
Brandon sat back in his chair, consenting to not talking about my father anymore. “Paulson says they can’t find him. He’s a ghost.”
I didn’t know what felt worse, them arresting an innocent man or being unable to catch a guilty one. I guess in either scenario, Gil was on the loose. At least now Benjy could move on with his life, whatever life was for him.
“Let me ask you something,” he said perking up. “Do you think it was Gil?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you had a big hunch it wasn’t Benjy. You thought it was too convenient and that your sister had grown out of her pedophile-bait phase. I’m just checking, with all signs pointing to Gil, do you think he did it?”
I didn’t answer right away because I didn’t really know what I thought. Benjy was different. You could tell Benjy was harmless and people were overreacting. Gil was bad news, and I’d fought tooth and nail to uncover his mere existence, so why couldn’t I commit 100 percent? Could everything I’d learned in the last few weeks about my family and myself just be coincidence? Or was there something shadier there, something twisted and growing, something just about to crack the surface?
Rape, I thought. The linchpin in all my theories. But that night, if it had all started with Linda and not the actual killer, any forensic timeline the police were using could be wrong. A thought that was both relieving and horrifying crept in. The night Jenny came to my apartment. The questions she was asking about sex. I didn’t think anything of it, typical teenage curiosity, just another bout of her annoying rapid-fire questions, but … “Could it have been consensual?” I asked. “The rape, could it have been consensual sex masked by unrelated trauma to her body?”