Love in the Time of Serial Killers(83)

When Conner showed up, I was finishing up my last edits to the In Cold Blood chapter, which was way better now that I’d focused more on Capote’s credibility and depiction of “truth” throughout his book, as opposed to whatever rambling mess I’d turned in before. I was a little behind now, and would have to write my Stranger Beside Me chapter and the conclusion once the semester had already started, which wasn’t ideal since my defense was scheduled for late October. But I knew I could make it work.

“Listen to this,” I said, holding open to a page in the book. “He is uncomfortable in his relationships to other people, and has a pathological inability to form and hold enduring personal attachments. I’m tagged in this picture and I don’t like it.”

“What’s that from?”

“A psychologist’s description of Dick Hickock after he’d examined him for the trial,” I said.

Conner came over and took the book out of my hands. “You need to get out of the house. Come on.”

I said I’d drive, so we headed to my Camry. I paused for only a minute before I started the ignition, glancing over at Sam’s house. His truck was in the driveway, but I hadn’t seen him in days—not since before my interview. He must’ve been going somewhere and staying gone, because he didn’t stick to his old pattern of back-and-forth from his lessons at Jocelyn’s.

“Still haven’t talked to him?” Conner asked.

I’d filled him in a little on what had happened—just that we’d broken up, to the extent we were together in the first place. I hadn’t told him it had been at the park, right after the proposal. I didn’t want to taint that memory in any way. Conner was still forwarding me new video clips when they popped up on social media.

“Not really,” I said.

“I wanted to go over there, thank him again for everything he did for us,” Conner said. “If you want, I can mention—”

“No,” I said. “Leave it. Please, Conner.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Anyway, where do you want to go? My treat, just not anywhere fancy like Outback. I don’t have Bloomin’ Onion money if I’m saving up for a wedding. My ceiling is fast casual.”

“Actually,” I said. “There’s somewhere I’ve been wanting to go, and this might be my only chance. It’s a bit of a drive, though—at least an hour.”

“Let’s do it.”

We didn’t talk much during the drive, just listened to the local alternative radio station, which I realized with a pang I would actually miss even though it seemed to interpret its own genre as One Very Popular Band or, in the alternative, Another Very Popular Band. I could tell Conner was getting suspicious once we pulled off the highway in a rural area where there were miles in between gas stations or any other marker of civilization.

Finally, I pulled onto a street in front of a run-down old house, set back and seemingly abandoned, surrounded by an overgrowth of weeds. I parked the car on the side of the road and unbuckled my seat belt.

“This was the Sunrise Slayer’s house,” I said. “Nobody’s lived here for at least a decade, since the family moved.”

“Uh,” Conner said. “I was hoping for somewhere with curly fries.”

“We’ll find somewhere to eat afterward. I just want to check it out.”

As clunky and overwrought as the writing had been in the Sunrise Slayer’s daughter’s memoir, one thing she’d done well was to bring the home where she grew up to life. I’d felt like I could map its layout, could peel the stickers off her walls with my own fingers, could hear the sound of bacon sizzling on the stove one morning when her dad cooked a rare breakfast. Of course, later she’d realize he’d been up early because he’d already killed a girl off the nearby running trail, but otherwise it had seemed like a usual domestic life. It had reminded me a lot of my own childhood.

“Did he, like . . . do anything here?” Conner asked, traipsing behind me through the tall grass.

“No.” The windows were fogged up, maybe from the humidity, and I pressed my face to the glass to see inside. Surprisingly, there was still stuff in there—an old couch that leaned to one side, a pile of what might have been clothes or wet cardboard or insulation from the ceiling, it was impossible to tell with the effect of time. This was what my dad’s house might’ve looked like, if left alone.

As if reading my mind, Conner said from behind me, “You know Dad wasn’t a serial killer, right?”

“Technically, we don’t know that,” I said. “But yes, I’m aware that it is highly unlikely, and that if he was, my interest in the subject would take on a macabre sort of irony.”

“Okay,” Conner said. “It just feels like you don’t know that. He was just a dude. I think because you didn’t have much of a relationship with him, the last ten or so years, that you built him up to be this malicious, horrible person. As far as dads go, he wasn’t great. He got angry a lot for no reason, he took absolutely zero interest in stuff that you liked but he thought was dumb, like me with video games or you with . . .” Conner gestured toward the house, as though to say this weird shit you’re into. “He made you think you were crazy or oversensitive or misremembering the way something happened, he could be really caustic and negative about the state of the world.”