Lies We Bury(46)

“He was exactly what I thought he might be. Self-involved. Presumptuous.”

“What were his spirits like, days before his release?”

I shrug, and the white envelope underneath my mattress returns to mind, pressing me to earn my paycheck. “I mean . . . it was my first time seeing him. He seemed . . . secure. Expectant. Assured of his freedom.”

In truth, he was a sad, lesser version of what I once knew him as: a terror, a resident player in my nightmares, although I’m not sure I could have picked him out of a lineup before this morning. The way he used to look at me as a child would send me crawling into my mother’s lap, covering my ears, waiting for her shouting to die down and for him to return upstairs. I’m not sure I even remembered that until now. Or maybe I did but tried to excise anything related to him from my mind. Being honest with myself, as I vowed I would be, might be painful.

I flag down our waiter for another beer. Wheat. Citrusy. Big. The smell of something deep fried wafts from the next table over.

“What else do you remember of him from when you were a kid?”

I look down at my hands, tan with knobby fingers. Other scars from my adolescence mar the wrists and knuckles in white lines, matching the polka dots of my inner elbow and its still-healing scab.

“The way he walked. His footsteps always seemed heavy, foreboding, coming down the stairs. In hindsight, that was probably the floorboards being old and him owning a Victorian. His footsteps were the first sign that he was on his way, and it was a three-times-a-week ritual. It was never a surprise, those heavy steps. The reaction they elicited in us was one of stress.”

“What would he do once he was down there?”

“Once a month, he would inspect us. Inspect the women first. Rosemary later told me her theory was that Chet was ex-military, but it turned out he’s a germaphobe; despite us being insulated from any serious diseases, he wanted to make sure we were all clean and well cared for physically. So it was first the women, then us girls.”

“How did he inspect you kids?”

The words lodge in my throat. I blink back tears. “When we were very small, we were running around in diapers all the time, so it wasn’t unusual for us to be naked. When we started wearing clothing more consistently, we would have to undress.” My cheeks flush, speaking my childhood shame.

The waiter returns with my beer, and I whisper a grateful “Thank you.”

Shia watches me a moment. He doesn’t try to lighten the mood or sympathize or say something utterly trite that people think will make things better when it can’t. When I feel in control of myself again, I exhale a deep breath. “I haven’t thought about our day-to-day in a long time.”

“Normal.” He squints at me with a reassuring smile. “And you haven’t been interrogated by police on the minutiae in a while. You have a lot of darkness to navigate but nothing to be ashamed of.”

His words trigger another memory, more recent than the ones we’re diving into—a theory. From a conversation I overheard outside the brewery and a thread I saw on an online forum for Portland crime lovers: the murders were committed for fun; anyone can hire someone to provide that kind of fringe sport if you know where to look. “Have you spent much time on the dark web?”

Shia pauses his sip of beer. “Isn’t that a bit of a non sequitur?”

“I mean, a little. But I’m not the only one with darkness. I heard someone talking about . . .” Although Shia is aware that I’m taking photos for the Post, I don’t want to advertise that I’m eavesdropping on law enforcement. “Well, what is it? The dark web.”

Shia drums his fingers on a laminated menu. “It’s part of the regular web. An overlay network that uses the internet, but you need certain software to access it. Because it’s encrypted, there are a lot of offbeat activities that go on there.”

“And how do you know about it? What’s a mild-mannered journalist doing, poking around there?”

Shia examines me. My suspicion. “To be honest with you, a lot. I weighed theories about your family—your locations, your backgrounds, what went on in your basement—against what other people had dug up over the years. A lot of conspiracy theorists, and those interested in your family, are users. They think the government knew about Chet’s secret family.”

“Fantastic.” Sarcasm steams through my words. Knowing now how dedicated Shia is to this book, he probably knows some of these users by name.

Shia sinks into a deep nod, folding his hands across his flat belly. Curly black hair falls from behind his ear. “Claire, I want to be candid with you. I can tell it’s not always easy to explore these moments, particularly if you weren’t aware of certain details or if you’ve repressed them. Are you getting something out of this arrangement? Is it helping you the way you thought it might?”

The more I learn about his tenacious research, the less I view Shia as some wide-eyed creative. But after a beer and the wine I drank at home, the anger I felt upon coming here shifts to indifference. “I mean, it’s bringing up a lot of stuff for me, sure. Did I tell you about the stuffed animal?”

He shakes his head.

“Off the record.” I lean forward.

Shia cocks his head at me, as though not fully trusting this potential gift. A black tattoo—a spiral fern—is visible on the left side of his neck, the kind I’ve seen on rugby players from New Zealand. He clicks the recorder to pause. “Of course.”