About half a mile up the mountain from Kelly and Shane’s house, in a double-wide surrounded by an army of prickly pears he’d planted himself, lived their nearest neighbor, a chainsaw artist who went by the name of Rocky Three.
“Rocky Three?” Kelly had said five years ago, when Shane had pointed him out during their very first drive to the home he had bought for them. Kelly thinking she was hitting the ground running on her new life of freedom—starting fresh—when she’d spotted him out there among his prickly pears, a shirtless, sinewy, battered-looking bald man, deep green tattoos crawling all over his red-brown back, chainsawing the guts out of an enormous tree trunk, sawdust flying all around him.
“Yep, that’s his name,” Shane had replied. “Even says it on his mailbox.”
“Rocky III was when the Rocky movies started getting bad,” said Kelly. And then Rocky Three’d turned around and faced their car and she had locked eyes with him—bits of sharp blue in a sad, leathery, tattooed face, those bright eyes like something from another, better time of life. Kelly had waved at Rocky Three and he’d waved back. I understand the name, she had thought. I understand him.
“Keep away from him,” Shane had said. “He’s nuts, and probably dangerous.”
“Our neighbor? But what if I need to borrow a cup of sugar?”
It had been a joke, but Shane hadn’t laughed. “He hasn’t lived here long. There are all kinds of rumors about him. Fortunately, he keeps to himself.”
One week later when Shane was meeting with a client in their home, she’d excused herself, walked the three miles, knocked on his door.
Back then, she hadn’t learned to drive yet. It was easier now.
Kelly pulled past the prickly pears and around the side of the double-wide and parked. His creations lined the back end of the trailer—an angry bear, a looming, sharp-fanged dragon, an angel with enormous beckoning wings and a skull for a face—Kelly’s favorite. He’d named it for her.
All the chainsawed statues were at least ten feet tall, carved out of tree trunks salvaged from Northern California clear-cuts. Rocky had them delivered to his home. Far as Kelly could tell, he never sold these things—he carved them for company. Kelly gazed into the skull face of the angel. Keep him safe. A corny thought, but not a new one.
She felt someone watching her, and when she turned, she saw Rocky standing in the doorway. He wore white drawstring pants, his skin like burned, painted parchment, and he regarded her the way he always did, warm but exasperated, as though their meetings occurred on a regular schedule that he had to keep reminding her about.
A tattoo of a large green eye stared out of the hollow of his neck. It made Kelly’s heart beat faster whenever she saw it. She had a theory as to the tattoo’s meaning but she never mentioned it to Rocky, didn’t want to, for fear he’d shoot it down. “Should I be sorry for your loss?” Rocky said.
Kelly nodded. “You saw the news.”
“Yes.”
“The police came to my house,” Kelly said. “Well, one detective.”
“Did he scare you?”
“Detectives don’t scare me.”
“I know. That was kind of a joke.”
Rocky ushered her into the trailer. It was clean and spare and smelled of sawdust. A man like this, you’d expect him to live in a space as cluttered as his yard, his skin. But Rocky Three was the opposite of a hoarder. His walls were bare. He didn’t even own a couch—just hard chairs, a bed that was barely softer, nothing that could collect dust.
There was a table in the kitchen area with a laptop on it, news headlines on the screen. Kelly saw a picture of Sterling Marshall. “I will miss him, you know,” she said.
“You barely knew him.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Kelly gave him a long look. “After all, I barely know you.”
“That’s not true.”
Kelly sat down on one of the hard chairs, wanting to collapse. “Thank you for having me in.”
He shook his head, eyes finding the bleached white floorboards. So clean, his home. So empty and perfect. “Your husband is with his family?”
“He’s at his parents’ house. He wasn’t around when the detective questioned me.”
“That’s good, I guess.” Rocky sighed. He went into the kitchen and drew a glass of water, placed it in Kelly’s hand. His skin brushed against hers as he did, and she was grateful for that, the calluses on his fingers, the rough warmth of his skin, familiar as she wanted it to be. “He talked about things, that detective,” she said quietly. “He asked me a lot of questions.”
“It’s what they pay him to do.”
Kelly stared at him, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I don’t know what to do, Rocky.”
“Do the police think you killed Sterling Marshall?”
She gave him flat eyes. “What do you think?”
“I think maybe you did.”
“Stop.”
He shrugged his shoulders. The bottle green eye tattoo twitched with the gesture. “I saw a snake in the road the other morning. Made me think of you.”
Kelly smiled a little. “Rattler?”
“No. Just a sweet little garter. I was walking up Old Woman Springs at sunrise and there was that little snake, slithering across the road, leisurely as you please.”
“Old Woman Springs is a busy road,” said Kelly. “The snake will get run over.”
“That’s what I thought. ‘That snake is dead meat.’ But still something is making it head that way, across a busy street, so slow and deliberate . . . You know? It’s compelled to go where it shouldn’t be going.”
Kelly swallowed some of the water, cool and smooth in her throat. “And that reminded you of me. The snake.”
“It reminded me of the situation. Our situation.”
“Oh.”
“All these years,” he said. “All these years, you’ve been knocking on my door.”
“Yes.”
“And I open the door, every time you knock.”
“So . . .”
“So, I can’t figure it out, Kelly. Which of us is the pickup truck, speeding up Old Woman Springs at sixty miles an hour? And which of us is that dumb, slow-moving snake?”
Kelly stood up. Strange, Rocky was such a powerfully built man, it made sense he’d be very tall. Yet when Kelly was on her feet and facing him, she looked him directly in the eye. That never stopped surprising her, how evenly matched they were.
“I would have picked up that snake if I were you,” she said, taking his calloused hand in hers, leading him to the bedroom. “I would have moved it out of the road.”
“DOES YOUR WIFE’S JOB TAKE HER AWAY FROM THE HOUSE A LOT?” Detective Braddock asked. She sat across from Shane in the den, working her notepad. It no longer bothered him, the note-taking, nor did his sister’s presence in the room with her perfume and her accusations. The room itself didn’t even bother him. Nothing did—other than the obvious. He felt as though someone had kicked him in the gut an hour earlier and he still hadn’t recovered from it.
What Shane wanted to know—what he needed to know—was what exactly Braddock had meant by “open murder investigation.”
Shane’s father had been shot in the center of the forehead, at very close range. Yet Shane had been the only one to mention suicide. There had been no note. He’d never known his father to be depressed. And what he had always known—well, since John McFadden’s death anyway—was that Dad had hated guns.
Also, there was this, the one fact that stuck in his mind, the one he couldn’t voice for fear that if he said it out loud, it might make more sense than he wanted it to: of the three shots that Shane’s wife had fired into a defenseless John McFadden on June 28, 1980, the one that had killed him had been the one that had struck him in the center of the forehead, at close range.
“Kelly works from home,” Shane said. His head felt numb and swimmy, the leather couch sticky against his back. He wanted an aspirin. A scotch. A handful of Ambien . . .
“Doing what?”
“Pardon?”
“You said your wife works out of the home. What does she do?”
“She’s a writer.”
Bellamy let out a noise of pure exasperation—half sigh, half scream. In the old days, the days before this past hour, Shane would have told her to shut up, get out of the room, at the very least, mind her own business. But again, things had changed.
“She writes profiles for a dating site,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“It doesn’t sound like a thing. But it is.”
The detective nodded, scribbling away. “Does she leave the home a lot? Go into Hollywood for her job?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“She doesn’t go anywhere for her job. She just makes up stories about pictures of soft porn models.”
“But you don’t know if she goes into Hollywood otherwise?”
“I . . . I like to give Kelly her space.”
“So when she leaves the house, you don’t ever find out where she’s going?”
“If she’s gone out for groceries,” he said, “she comes back with groceries. But I don’t ask ahead of time ‘Are you going for groceries?’”
“My God,” Bellamy whispered. “My God.”
The detective said, “Let me ask you something, Mr. Marshall.”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever spoken to your wife about the murder she committed?”
“Huh?”
“John McFadden. Have you ever—”
“Why does that matter?”
“Why do you think it matters?” Bellamy said, but the detective ignored her.
“I’m just wondering,” she said, “what she thinks about it all now. If it haunts her at all, what she did to John McFadden. If she feels guilty, or if she thinks she was justified in some way and that your father’s enduring respect for the man she killed . . . Well, I’m sure you saw what your father said just two days ago about Mr. McFadden, in the Times?”
“I don’t know what Kelly thinks about.” Shane’s words hung in the air—the most honest words he’d spoken all day.
“Did you hear any noises last night?” Braddock was saying. “Possibly your wife leaving on one of her night drives?”
“I took sleeping pills last night. I was dead to the world.”
There was a time in his life when Shane would have sworn up and down that he knew Kelly, knew her better than anyone—and weirdly, it had been when Kelly was in prison but before they got married, when she and Shane weren’t allowed to touch each other but through that thick glass.
Back then, he would spend hours, days, writing letters to Kelly, most of those letters dozens of pages long, most of those pages answering the hundreds of questions Kelly would send him in her careful, looped handwriting, those questions so much more revealing than any statement could be. What was the happiest day you ever had? Tell me everything you remember about it, in as much detail as you can. Do you ever feel like something is missing from your life—and if so, what? Can you please go outside and tell me what the sun feels like on the back of your neck, Shane? I really want to know what that feels like because today I’m not allowed out.
What is it like to have a sister?
He wasn’t sure whether it was Kelly’s questions that had made him fall in love with her or her obvious joy at receiving his answers. But either way, she made Shane feel needed, which, as the youngest, weakest link in one of Hollywood’s most shimmering families, was not something he felt very often.
I feel a connection with you, Shane. Do you feel it too? Sometimes, when I ask you questions, I already know what you’re going to say. I can picture your response in my mind—the same words, even—and then you write those exact words and it’s like we share one brain. Like we’re two parts of something huge.
“Answer the detective, Shane,” Bellamy said as Shane remembered his reply: I feel it too. But what if this huge thing that the two of us are together is a bad thing—like Godzilla?
Godzilla is good, Shane. He’s just misunderstood because of the way he looks. (And by the way, I knew you would say that!)
Shane’s gaze shifted to Braddock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can you please repeat the question?”
She nodded. A lock of gunmetal hair fell across her eye. She pushed it behind an ear with a gesture that seemed half angry, as though her own hair were interfering with her investigation. “I had asked,” Braddock said, “if there’s anyone you know of who your wife does confide in.”
“I don’t think so.”
“She isn’t seeing a therapist?”
“No.”
“Friends?”
“The only friend I can think of . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence without laughing, so he stopped.
“Excuse me?”
“Bellamy,” he said. “Can you please go check on Mom?”
“I want to hear your answer.”
“Mom’s a mess. I’m worried about her. We can’t just leave her out there with Flora.”
“I’ll check on her,” she said, “after you say who Kelly’s friend is.”
“Fine.” Shane exhaled. “It’s you.”
“What?”
“It’s you,” he repeated. “You’re the only friend of Kelly’s that I know of and you know what? I think that even after all these years and everything you’ve done to her . . . I think there’s a part of her that still thinks of you that way. As her friend.”
Bellamy, for once in her life, was at a loss for words. And for that, and that alone, Shane felt grateful.
He stood up, gazing down at his sister with a sense of power he knew was only temporary. “Pathetic, isn’t it?” Shane said between his teeth, muscles tensing. He headed out of the room. “I’m going to go check on Mom.” He said it without so much as turning around.
ROCKY’S SHEETS WERE CRISP AND COLD—SO UNLIKE KELLY’S OWN, which were made of a very thin, soft flannel. She didn’t like thinking of home when she lay here, in his bed—and there really was no reason to. Her troubles with Shane—what the shrink at Carpentia had called intimacy issues—had been going on long before she’d ever laid eyes on Rocky Three. She told herself it was Sterling Marshall’s threats, the fears they inspired, that kept her from getting physical with Shane. But in those very rare moments when she was honest with herself, she knew she could have gotten an IUD, knew she could have gotten her tubes tied if she’d wanted it that badly. It was something else . . .
She liked to think of Rocky, of this, as a recurring dream—something that existed on a different plane than her day-to-day life, something she couldn’t be blamed for. A drawer that stayed shut.
Rocky seemed to feel the same way. He called them “meetings,” their times together. He called it a “friendship,” not an affair. And no matter how tender their meetings were, they never held each other after. They lay on their backs, the two of them, gazing at the bleached ceiling of Rocky’s pristine bedroom, his hand covering hers in a way that felt more protective than affectionate—and all of it so right to Kelly, so familiar in that way she dared not voice. Like years ago. Like going back in time.
“I lied to you, Rocky,” she said.
He turned. She felt his crystalline eyes on her, his face close to hers, the warmth of his breath. “About what?”
Kelly kept her eyes on the ceiling. “Earlier, when I said detectives don’t scare me.”
“They do?”
“That detective did. I didn’t act like it, but he scared me a lot.”
“Why?”
“What he could do to me,” she said.
“What could he—”
“I don’t want to go back to Carpentia. I mean it, Rocky. I’d rather die.”
“Kelly.”
“Yeah?”
“Look at me.”
She turned to face him, this painted creature. The sheet had fallen from his chest, and she brushed her hand against him, traced the outline of the diamond-scaled fish that swam over his heart. They glistened silver—the scales. Something she’d never noticed. That was Rocky. His skin. Always something to discover in it.
“Look at me,” he said again. “Look into my eyes.”
She didn’t want to. It always choked her up to look directly into his eyes. Like going back in time. But he’d asked and so she did—her gaze moving up from the eye on his throat, through those creeping vine tattoos crisscrossing his cheeks, curling around his thin, saintlike lips. So much pain he’d gone through, just to look different from the way he used to look, however that had been. She couldn’t imagine him without the tattoos, though sometimes she wanted to . . .
“My eyes, Kelly.” He said it just as she made it there, into that bright, sad blue.
“If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Were you at Sterling Marshall’s house last night?”
She swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Does it matter?” she said. “Would it matter to them?”
He brought his hand up to her cheek, brushed away a tear she hadn’t realized was there. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.”