Lies We Bury(42)

The signs that pointed to the visitors’ parking lot a half mile down also directed me to a shuttle waiting to ferry passengers to the main security gate. Thursday afternoon—apparently the perfect time to engage with your incarcerated loved one. I stepped off the yellow school bus to anxious memories of arriving at elementary school as a child. A similar taut feeling coils in my belly now, like a garden hose ready to burst.

Ten minutes pass in line before I’m admitted into a stuffy waiting room. I take a seat and try to blend in. A soap opera plays on a boxy television mounted on the wall.

After another half hour, my name is called, and I’m ushered into a rectangular room with four people who all seem to be visiting the same inmate. We step through a metal detector, then into a long hallway with flickering lighting panels overhead that give off the ambience of a psych hospital in a horror movie just before the power goes out in a thunderstorm and all the patients run loose to exact their revenge. The air is dense with body odor.

We turn left into a shallow hallway. Another armed guard grants us entry into a room where a wall of Plexiglas bisects ten visitor booths. Each cubby comes complete with a landline phone. Beige is the central theme, accenting the walls and the chair I lower myself into. Inmates enter the other side of the room and spot their visitors with a grateful smile, a laugh, or a somber meeting of the eyes.

Emotions churn in my belly, a cesspool of hate mixed with terror, but I sit still. I jam my hands under my thighs and, for some reason, feel relieved I chose a high-neck dress.

He can’t hurt you.

You’re not a child anymore.

You can leave now, and no one will know you were here aside from the lobby clerk.

I clutch the strap of my shoulder bag and rise to exit the way that I entered when a man walks to the chair opposite my own. Handcuffed, knobby knuckles curl over the metal seat back. The top two buttons of an orange jumpsuit are undone, revealing a white shirt underneath. Scraggly beard hairs punctuate a pudgy face. Deep lines mark the skin around tired brown eyes. Chet takes a seat, then slowly lifts the telephone from its cradle. Hesitation gives way to curiosity, and I see his gaze take in my face, my neck, my chest, and my hands, before flicking back up to my eyes. It registers that he’s never seen me before; he doesn’t recognize me. Rosemary, I know, has never come to see her former captor, and I know my sisters wouldn’t dream of it; I don’t know if Nora has been here.

Strange feeling, given that I memorized photos of him when he was somewhere around the age at which he abducted my mothers. I had just turned ten years old and gained more understanding of what had happened to us, and I wanted to know what he looked like. The occasional tabloid cover story over the years featured photos of him in prison looking depressed and disheveled.

He can’t hurt you. Mustering every ounce of strength I have to not run away, to not run screaming from the past as I have done my whole life, I imitate his movement until I have the receiver to my ear. “Hello, Chet.”

He hesitates at my voice. Then a smile lifts his cheeks. “Marissa. Nice of you to come all this way.”

A shudder ripples across the thin fabric of my dress. “You know who I am?”

He nods, pleased that I wasn’t expecting this. “I’ve tried to keep up with you online. There was a snapshot of you a few years back that I think still looks like you.”

Nausea boils in my stomach, realizing that all these years I was worried someone was watching me, maintaining a record of my mistakes and self-involved loathing, it was Chet. I grip the leather of my bag, digging my nails into the thick material.

“Chet, I came to ask you a few questions. Not for some kind of reunion.” My tone is gruff, loud, but people beside us continue their conversations, untroubled; witnessing someone yell in this room is probably a square on the prison-visit bingo card.

Chet leans in closer, pressing the phone to his face. “What kind of questions?”

I inhale a deep breath. Try to wrap my head around this moment and that it’s actually happening. That through the coiled wire of the phone, winding along the plastic rings through the glass barrier to Chet’s receiver, we are physically connected. The thought makes me gag.

“I’m working on . . . a photography project.”

He sits up straight, his thin eyebrows lifting into his hairline. Something like excitement passes across the gray stubble around his mouth. A new wave of revulsion coats my body; that’s the same way Lily reacts when she’s intrigued by something.

“How can I help?”

I pause, savoring withholding something from him for once. His face is open and eager from behind the glass, and the urge to rise up and leave without another word, just to make him wonder and wait and wait and wait, returns to contract the muscles in my toes.

“There’s a killer committing murders underground, or transferring the bodies underground afterward. I’m taking photos of the crime scenes.”

According to the Post update I read in line outside, the body in the cooler at The Stakehouse, Gavin Nilsson, was restrained in the adjacent tunnels before being moved behind the kegs. After his throat was slit. When I read that, my gasp drew concerned looks from the strangers beside me. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t examine the body more closely on-site.

“How many?”

“Two. So far.”

He shifts the receiver to his other ear, his handcuffs knocking together. “What else?”