The Damned Read online

  I was hugging one of the two wooden supports that held the balcony up when I saw the hammer.

  A ball-peen lying next to a rusted can of paint next to the back door. The can dented like someone realized they picked a tool without a hook to lift up its lid and figured they’d beat it open anyway. When that didn’t work they quit, leaving both behind.

  Now I was picking the hammer up. Throwing it into the air and getting lucky when it landed on the balcony with a metallic ring like it found a gong up there.

  Then I was wriggling up the post again, splinters stabbing through my shirt. At one point I swung out with only a hand and the toes of one foot holding on, and there was time to see I was going to fall, my head leading the way.

  But I didn’t let go. The swing brought me around to the railing and I used the momentum to pull myself up and over. Made the same gong sound with my face as it hit a steel mixing bowl, left out there as if to catch the rain.

  I was ready to use the hammer on the sliding door handle but didn’t have to. It had been left open an inch.

  Even though the gonging and hammer tossing and body crashing had already alerted any conscious people inside to an intruder, I pulled the sliding door open as quietly as I could.

  Nothing came at me from out of the dark. Until something did. A dead-aired wall of body odor, sweetly foul as a sack of rotten oranges.

  It was even hotter inside than outside. A stillness that slowed the capacity for movement as well as thought, so that I put observations of the room together in a linking of sluggish logic.

  No bed or furniture

  means nobody sleeps here

  means there’s nothing here to see

  means keep going, Danny

  On the second-floor landing, three other doors. One to an empty bathroom. One to another bedroom similarly bedless and unfurnished, the closet vacant except for what appeared to be a nest made of dried grass and ripped-up magazine pages and pieces of IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY! ribbon on the floor. The last opened to the third bedroom where, by the look of it, by the smell of it, somebody came to sleep.

  Though all the rooms were small, this was the biggest of the three, with a single bed (no sheets, no pillow, the mattress polka-dotted with mold) and a bureau. Inside the drawers a couple pairs of track pants with RED WINGS down the leg. A lone pair of boxer shorts patterned with the Major League Baseball logo. Three identical T-shirts: all XXL, all with THE ROAR OF ’84—DETROIT TIGERS WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS on the front. The wardrobe of someone who did a one-stop shop in a sports store bargain bin.

  There may have been more in the closet but it was padlocked.

  I was wondering how I might get in there when I felt the hammer in my hand. I’d been carrying it with me from room to room the whole time. If I used it on the metal brackets on the door’s frame it might be enough to rip it off.

  There was just enough thinking still going on to tell myself to go downstairs and check if there was anyone there first.

  A front hall of curled linoleum and rat droppings. A kitchen at the back with an unplugged fridge holding nothing but rolls of toilet paper on its shelves. A dining room with a fold-out chair and oil drum for a table.

  The living room was where the living happened.

  A coffee table with a glass crack pipe, balls of tinfoil, and a pair of disposable lighters on its surface. A sofa with the springs pushing through. Fast-food bags and sandwich wrappings—all crushed, all Church’s Chicken—tossed on the floor like a paper archipelago.

  A couple thoughts arrived as I heaved in the hot fudge air of 3380 Arndt Street.

  First, whether it belonged to Malvo or somebody else, I had just broken into the house of a crack-smoking stranger.

  Second, crack-smoking strangers didn’t like it when their houses were broken into.

  And then the slo-mo conclusion that followed: if there was nobody here now, they’d be back soon. Because there on the table, nested in tinfoil, was a pale, unused rock. The only thing of value in the whole rank, slope-floored place.

  Unless there was something in the padlocked closet upstairs.

  I started up but had to take three breaks for my heart to calm. The hammer gaining weight in my hand the closer I got to passing out.

  I’m close, Ash. I’m trying to help you. But I need you to help me.

  In the bedroom, I lined up the hammer and the lock brackets. Testing the arc, the point to make contact. Then I brought it down.

  It did nothing but make it feel like both my wrists were broken. Not that it stopped me from trying it again.

  And again.

  On the fourth strike, the wood split. The bracket screws pulled halfway out. Another swing and they fell to the floor. As did the hammer when I tossed it behind me so I could pull the door open.

  Ash.

  Clippings of newspaper reviews of her in South Pacific. Every picture with her in it published in the Dondero yearbook of 1989.

  Along with photos I’d never seen before.

  Ash sitting in the passenger seat of Dean Malvo’s car wearing a strangely nervous smile. Ash’s face in close-up, eyes closed and lips open in a lustful pose that betrayed a falseness, as though she’d been told to shape her face that way. Ash naked. Sitting on an earth floor, lying on a blanket and looking back over her bare shoulder, reaching her hands out to the one who held the camera, legs wide. The shock of her skin. The leering angle of the lens.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  Meg Clemens was taped there, too, closest to the floor, as if the images had been arranged in the shape of a tree, a time line where Meg was the roots and Ash the trunk. Higher up, many other girls for the branches and leaves. All about the same age, similarly posed, though more active the closer they got to the top, the photographer’s demands grown bolder over time until parts of himself were visible, too.

  On the floor, a metal cashbox. But no cash inside. Notes. Folded pieces of lined paper for the most part, but also memo pad pages, index cards, the back of a Get Well Soon card. Some a back-and-forth correspondence between someone who signed off only with “D.” and another who wrote in girlish script. Signed “Ash” with a little heart over the top of the h.

  Her hand.

  Her voice. Or one of them.

  I can’t wait to see you! Feel you too. I just want to make you happy. You know that, don’t you? After last night, how couldn’t you?

  You are my man. My teacher. (You say you don’t like it when I call you that, but I can tell you do. I’ll show you tomorrow. I’ll show you . . .)

  Please tell me these rehearsals are almost OVER! I love the show but I am SO tired of seeing you every day and not being able to touch you and kiss you every day too. We’re going to have that soon, right? We can have our Alfred any time we want . . .

  This showed up a lot. A code word. A place that had been turned into an interchangeable verb/noun.

  Wanna Alfred after school?

  Let’s meet for an Alfred.

  This girl needs her Alfred!

  “Turn around.”

  The voice was slurred at the edges, stoned but hyperalert. The way his two-word command both threatened and conceded a point, as if he’d been expecting this very moment for a long time and now must go through the actions that were required of him.

  When I’d shuffled a half circle on my knees I noticed that Bob Malvo held the hammer in his right hand. It brushed against his pant leg. His grip white-knuckled.

  “You one of the dads?” he said. “An uncle or something? Or one of them hire you?”

  “You think I’m here to hurt you.”

  He looked me over, searching for a weapon. “A lot of people want that.”

  “I do, too.”

  “But you’re the one on your knees.”

  He was bigger than I’d anticipated. Wider and man-boobed. He wore his fourth THE ROAR OF ’84—DETROIT TIGERS WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS T-shirt and green surgeon’s pants, both so voluminous that when he moved they took a half second to
catch up with him.

  “How’d you manage to keep all your souvenirs?” I said, and started to rise but he raised the hammer waist-high and I held myself still. “I would’ve thought they’d taken all this stuff before you went to prison.”

  “Storage units. You know how cheap that shit is?”

  “Why keep it at all?”

  “My memory’s not what it was.”

  He exhaled. Blew out his lips and a drizzle of spit fell over my face.

  “Are you going to let me go?”

  I tried to prevent it from sounding like a plea, but it did anyway. Not that he heard it. His mouth widening to show root-dead teeth and black gums.

  “You’re the brother. The twin,” he said. “She always said you got the shitty end of the stick.”

  “You raped my sister.”

  “That makes it sound so one-sided. And like I said, my memory’s a little foggy about the particulars. But I’ll tell you this. She ruined me. Once you’ve tasted berries that sweet, the rest needs a little extra sugar on top. Know what I’m saying?”

  Nothing changed in his face but it was clear now, in that moment, that he intended to smash my skull in with the hammer. It would happen without warning. He didn’t think anymore, he only acted, a jittery collection of impulses. Just like the men who invaded Willa and Eddie’s home. Just like Ash. The mistake you made was trying to find the humanness in them, the line between what they might do and would never do, and while you were looking, they brought the hammer down.

  “Did you murder them?” I said, my hands drifting in front of my face in a reflex of defense.

  “You might need to clarify—”

  “Did you bury Meg in the bottom of that house? Did you try to do the same to Ash but something went wrong and you trapped her down there instead? Started a fire? Did you kill my sister?”

  Did you kill me?

  Malvo stood over me. Not hesitating. Recalling.

  “She was the most amazing actress,” he said. “I didn’t even know what part she thought she was playing half the time. Victim. Cocksucker. Headfucker. Ingénue. Great performances, every one of them. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that wasn’t real! And that wasn’t, either! Or that! None of it was.”

  He absently lifted the hammer level with his shoulders. The sweat-darkened rubber handle. The gouged ball of its head.

  “I gave up after that girl,” he said, and lowered his eyes to mine. “I never acted again once I fucked your sister. All it left me with was fucking other little sisters.”

  I know he said this—other little sisters—because I heard the words. But there was something going on at the same time he spoke them. Something I was doing. Lunging at Bob Malvo’s legs and wrapping my arms around his calves. Uprooting him. Howling at the hammer as it struck the middle of my back.

  Then it was fingernails and fists and teeth.

  A sickening animal screech when the hammer found its way against my ear. Malvo’s thumb in my eye, working to push it through to the back of my head.

  I was aware of making some decisions. The biting of his unshaved chin. The pinched-off artery, or tendon, or something cordlike and tender in his neck that made him gasp. The kneeling on the wrist that sprung open the fingers around the hammer’s handle.

  It fell to the carpet.

  Definitely blood on it now. Definitely mine.

  It glued my fingers to the handle. Kept my palm in the right place long enough for me to swing it through the air like a pendulum, cracking into Malvo’s jaw as it went.

  Partly because of my revulsion at the sound the bone made when it broke—a bone in his face—and partly because of the black fish swimming around in my head, the hammer flung out of my hands so that it tumbled once before landing with a sigh on the bed.

  If it were me on the floor, jaw-broken and bitten, I’d be done. But it was as if Malvo didn’t feel a thing. As if he were just waking up.

  Bucking me off him. Slapping me away with the back of a hand. Reaching onto the bed for the hammer with the other.

  How is he moving so fast?

  There was a corner of my brain that found this question genuinely interesting. There was another corner that realized staying where I was would give him the time to paint the walls with the insides of my skull.

  I was on my knees in the bedroom. Then I was moving.

  To the landing. Banging off a wall. Into the empty bedroom I first entered.

  Heaving back the sliding glass door to the balcony.

  Spilling over the side.

  Stumbling away from the house. One hand over my gut, the other held out in front of me. The pose of a 1950s running back, protecting the ball as he barreled toward the goal line.

  I didn’t know if Malvo was behind me or not. I didn’t look back.

  Clawed open the driver side door and stabbed the keys into the ignition.

  Put one foot over the other and kicked them both down on the gas.

  31

  * * *

  I drove through the night along streets I’d always heard mention of but never traveled alone. Gratiot Avenue. Conant Street. Mound Road. The traffic lights flashing, all saying go, go, go.

  But there was no going back to the hotel, no sleep, not after what I knew. Because it wasn’t enough that I knew it. Ash needed to see it, too.

  And what was that, exactly?

  That Dean Malvo was an emptily charming monster who sought substitute teaching for the access it afforded him, and drama for the parts he found most useful to play. Caring Dean. Sexy Dean. Boyfriend Dean. Daddy Dean.

  What else? He went to prison for only part of the damage he’d done. Because there were two lives he’d taken in Royal Oak. Malvo murdered Meg and Ash to prevent them from exposing him for what he was, burned down an empty house downtown with Meg’s bones and a still-alive Ash in it—the same house he’d take the two of them to, where he took pictures of them, his first pieces in what, over years, went on to grow into an extensive collection of memorabilia—and got away with it.

  It fit. It worked.

  But it didn’t answer every question that had me drifting through the dark fields of Detroit.

  If it was Malvo who started the fire, wouldn’t Ash have known it was him?

  Maybe she didn’t see who it was who locked her in the cellar.

  Maybe she didn’t think he could have done it.

  Maybe she needed proof.

  Maybe she knew it was him, but needed to see him pay.

  The photos and letters and whatever else he kept in the cashbox would do it. Show how she wasn’t the only one. That would convince Ash as well as the police. It would surely be enough to substantiate murder charges, the closing of a nagging file. Malvo doing time until his time ran out and then his real punishment would begin.

  The problem was, I didn’t have the cashbox.

  Somewhere along the way, after hundreds of random turns, I got lost and didn’t bother trying getting unlost. The leaning houses, the cars propped up on cinder blocks, the fenced acres of buckling cement, the inexplicable frequency of motorboats, tarped and rusting in otherwise vacant lots—a monochrome procession just outside the headlights’ reach.

  I only stopped after I drove into a seesaw.

  An asleep-at-the-wheel detour over the curb and through what must have once been somebody’s backyard but now was neither back nor front of anything. And in the middle of it, the remains of a playground. The metal bar on a pivot, the red saddle at each end. All of it toppled over at the end of my folded hood.

  I backed up to the street again, made another couple turns, and parked. Made sure the doors were locked. Let my eyes close.

  It felt like I was out for less than two minutes when I heard the tapping.

  Hard metal on the driver side window. A pipe. A blade. The end of a gun.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  It was meant to wake me up. So I pretended to stay asleep.

  Tap, tap . . . CRACK.

  I opened my eye
s and pushed away from the door at the same time. The flinching anticipation of the end of things that I knew was only the beginning of something else.

  There was the spiderweb of cracks over the window, silvery and fine. What I heard had weight. Wanted in.

  Not there now.

  I checked all the windows. A horizon of night. Not a face to be seen, not a figure. Not a vehicle other than mine parked along the length of the street that looked more like a country road, bordered by grass so tall it could have been a farmer’s crop ready for harvest.

  Was there time for someone to run across the street and hide in one of those fields? No. Though maybe there was time to drop out of sight. Squeeze under the car’s chassis. Wait me out.

  The smart thing to do would be to start the car and drive. Keep going even if I rolled over whoever might be under me.

  So I tried to be smart. It didn’t help turn over a dead engine.

  Four times I hit it, priming the gas, the battery waning. On the fifth try it didn’t even lend the dash enough light to see what time it was.

  The time of death.

  It had been so long since I’d heard Ash’s voice in my head I almost welcomed it. Except I knew that if she was there, if she’d come by to witness what was going to happen next, it couldn’t be good for me.

  I unlocked the door. Kicked it open.

  When nothing immediately attacked or fired or stabbed, I stepped out of the car. Bent down to look under it. Walked around and popped the trunk to confirm that nothing had found its way in there.

  Then I remembered my phone. So long as there were still bars showing on the thing, I could put in a 911 call and wait for the cavalry to arrive. Out here, it could be a while. Some guy who didn’t know where he was saying he’d hunkered down in a parked car with somebody trying to smash their way in? They may not find me for a couple days. They may not come at all.

  Either way, it was worth hitting the numbers. And now that I was standing out there, the inside of the Impala looked relatively cozy.

  I got back in. Closed the door.

  In the next breath, I took in the smell.

  Perfume and soil and spoiled meat. Overwhelming and close.