Bram
Armadillo Car Rental protects their customers’ privacy to a level that makes the White House security team look like a rent-a-cop situation from the mall.
Mason has traveled to the heart of Kaswell, to the exact location that we believe the rental car may have come from, and spoken to, bribed, and casually threatened each of their four eager-to-serve-and-protect employees. One thing we know for certain, the car was most likely rented on or around August second and returned the next day. A small gray sedan that couldn’t have tripped more than forty miles if it was a clean round trip.
After a long day at the office, rife with routine drillings, fillings, a crown, and an ornery senior in his eighties who informed me that dentistry was nothing more than modern-day train robbing—on behalf of his uninsured granddaughter with a mouthful of chalk for teeth—I close the door to my office and pull a thin silver laptop out of my briefcase. It feels as if I pulled Simone right back into the land of the living. I set it on my desk and examine it like some scientific artifact. It indeed feels like one, some relic from a painful time best forgotten. I pluck the cords out and fire it up, open the monitor with caution as if I was opening a crypt, some horrible time capsule that threatens to rip those measly emotional scabs right off and cause me to finally bleed to death the way God intended.
The screen blinks to life, and my chest bucks, anticipating the worst. A happy family stares back at me, our nuclear family unit set as the screensaver, but the screen goes black and a thin gray window prompts me to put in a password.
After the great tragedy that had stolen our lives, and, yes, I count myself in that number along with my children and wife, I had to slowly go about the task of removing their material imprint from this planet. For almost six weeks after Simone was bludgeoned to death, the house remained a crime scene. Neighbors moved overnight to avoid the media circus, to avoid thekilleron the loose. Once I had custody of the house again, the coroner gave me the name of a cleanup committee dedicated to scraping brains off ceilings. Every trace of Simone’s DNA was excavated to the tune of four thousand dollars. It was a nightmare that appeared to be subsiding to the untrained eye, but the truth of it was, I didn’t want any part of that house ever again. Simone and I hadn’t even gotten to the task of clearing out the kids’ rooms. They were in full-on shrine mode, and I was content with that. It was where I spent most of my time after the funerals. Twin caskets. Twin agonies that never ceased. In a way, it was a relief knowing that the house was tainted, that I could never go back. After the DNA scraping team finished, I had the carpet ripped out and hired another crew to go in and pick the living room of all its contents. I called in a dumpster, threw out the bloodstained furniture, and was left with yet another gaping hole in my life—a minuscule one at that in comparison to all the other holes, but my life had enough holes in it that you could drive a Semi through.
My fingers tap over the keyboard, and my heart thumps unnaturally. I hadn’t opened the laptop since that day, let alone touched the very places my wife’s hands last happily danced away. But the pictures, all of the pictures of the kids were carefully loaded and sent God knows where through this device by my very careful wife who was excellent at documenting our journey together. I try one password, then another, the kids’ names, our names, but it’s not until I try the kids’ names in combination does the screensaver blink to life, the four of us on the lake in a tiny skiff I had rented, a life jacket on both Henry and Isla. Henry’s expressive eyes look as if they’re reaching out to me, calling for help from the other side of the screen, from the other side in general. And my hand slaps over my mouth to absorb some of the pain.
Isla. Beautiful, sweet Isla with her quirky smile, her tongue poking through the hole between her teeth. She always had a joke at the ready, a silly knock-knock joke that she read in a book she borrowed from the library. She had a dark laugh she expressed frequently while tormenting her brother. They were best friends. The only small comfort to be gleaned in that great tragedy is that they were together. And yet when Simone died, there was little comfort to know the three of them were reunited. To lose a wife so tragically after losing both children so horrifically, it didn’t make sense. It boggled my mind to think about. God knows I couldn’t process it. I’m not sure why this happened. But deep down, I suspected my sins had come home to roost.
Loretta comes to mind, her body lying at the base of that hotel room, her limbs set out in jagged angles, and I quickly blink her out.
The rest of the desktop is littered with pictures of the kids, memes she’s stolen from the Internet, inspirational phrases which I have always found odd coming from a woman who denied anything to do with spirituality. Her own thoughts about death never amounted to more than the fact she believed we turned into compost. No soul, no spirit, no heavenly choir to welcome us home. I certainly hope she’s discovered she was wrong—that she’s holding the children close to her heart right at this very moment.
I head over to the documents folder but find it empty and mull that fact over for a second. Simone wrote as voraciously as she read. She had folders for each one of her projects, and I used to marvel at how many plates she had spinning at once.
I click over to finder and check out the apps, the software, all of it set to bare bones, basic as if the laptop never belonged to her for four years. I click onto the Internet and look up her history, but there’s nothing. My stomach cinches. The laptop was closed and left on the bed. An action that I thought was odd to begin with, considering Simone never sat and watched television without doing something with her hands and usually that involved her laptop and her phone. If Simone was anything, she was the queen of multitasking.
I run a quick search of the security, the laptop history and find nothing. I head back into the desktop and click into each of the dozens of pictures littering the screen as microscopic thumbnails. Isla and Henry, Simone in most of the shots. Their eyes. Their smiles. It kills me on every level.
My fingers tap over the keys faster and faster, and a nauseating pattern begins to emerge. In every one of these pictures the kids, Simone, they’re all in their bathing suits. Simone was able to be in a few because Kelly was taking them. The lake is visible behind them. That damned lake.
My heart stops cold when I see that pink ribbon tied to Isla’s ponytail. It was still in her hair when I saw her later that night at the morgue.
A bite of acid tears at my stomach, and I hold my breath as I click through them faster and faster. Simone with the kids, waving to the kids from shore, a shot of her walking away, and it gives off an eerie voyeuristic feel. Back to the kids in full splash mode, a couple of the ground, a shot of a pale leg in that final shot, Simone’s. I inspect it further. The foot is coming toward the camera. I think on this for a second. Simone said she was busy writing, and I’m assuming that’s where she was off to. She probably came back to collect the camera from Kelly before she left.
I pull out my phone to text Mace my findings. He was the one that suggested I check it out in the event there was something I missed.
Laptop seems to be picked clean. The only evidence that it belonged to Simone are the pictures. No articles, no projects. Would that just disappear over time?I already know the answer to it, but a part of me still hits send.
He texts right back.No. Do you think it was sanitized?
I glare up over at the laptop and spot Simone’s smiling face, and it suddenly feels like she’s laughing.
Why would she do that? What would she have to hide?
He texts back.Don’t know. But I got my hands on the records for Armadillo Rental Cars on and around the dates of the crime. You’re welcome.
“Shit.” I sit up and stare at the phone a good long while.I’ll meet you at the Thirsty Fox in an hour.
Make it two. I’ve got another fish to fry. See you there.
Two hours. My heart thumps wildly in my chest as I look back at that screensaver, a painful reminder of another life, another wife, another beautiful, beautiful set of children.
I pull it forward and get online. I head over to Facebook to her personal page. The last post was a meme, a woman in hair rollers complaining about it being a man’s world while she holds a globe under her bare foot, a baby in the other. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but I force myself to look at the image until my eyes burn.
All Simone and I ever did was argue. After the kids passed away, we cried but not together, not mostly. Simone was so full of toxic rage, so much negativity. I couldn’t look at her the right way without sparking a fury in her.
The image of the meme flips into one of those forefront background images, and I see something in it I’ve never seen before. Partially hidden behind her is a man with a woman’s legs wrapped around his back. The woman looks young and fit, a wash of blond hair dangling from the side. The woman in the rollers seems oblivious to the fact her husband is cheating on her. Is that what this is? Why would she post this? My ears thump with their own heartbeat.
I scroll down and read the comments, some as recent as four months ago.
I’m so sorry this has happened to you. You’ve been through so much. I hope he gets the death penalty.
