Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

Harvey goes pale.

“Those poor girls,” Mrs. Chancellor says. “They must be scared out of their wits. The news said one of them was found okay, is that true?”

“It is,” I say, answering her, but I’m looking at Harvey. Harvey looks physically ill, like all the bones in his body have become poisonous.

He notices me, makes a slight swallowing gesture, then says “I don’t know where Ariel is, or have any idea where Caleb may be.”

“Caleb is looking for her,” I tell them. “If we find Ariel, we may find Caleb.”

“You probably think we’ve given up on her,” Mrs. Chancellor says, “the way we let her work the streets, but that’s not true. We love her, and if we could bring her home we would.”

“She’ll die on those streets,” Harvey says, and his voice breaks a little as he says it, for the first time showing some real emotion toward his daughter. Part of him must still see her as the little girl in the pictures on the walls. “I don’t. .” he says, and he chokes up, and in the tradition of Harvey Chancellor, he only chokes up a little, “I don’t doubt it.”

His wife gives him a look, one that says a whole lot of things-it tells him she loves him, that she feels bad for him, that she wishes he wouldn’t think that way even though both of them do.

“When you find her, tell her to come home, will you?” Mrs. Chancellor says, still looking at her husband.

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’ll see you out,” Harvey says, and we all stand.

When I step outside, he follows me and closes the door behind him. I turn toward him. “One of those names didn’t sit well with you, Harvey. Why don’t you tell me what you couldn’t say in front of your wife?”

“Listen,” he says, and then he says nothing, giving me nothing to listen to but the night, a car passing by one street over, somewhere there is water running, and somewhere somebody slams a door. I let him fight with what he has to say, knowing that if he doesn’t get there I’m going to shake it out of him.

“I’m listening,” I tell him, after a long ten seconds have passed.

“The thing is, I’ve seen you in the news over the last few years,” he says, and I wonder where this is going, whether I’m going to have to defend myself. “Two serial killers have died and you’ve been with each of them when it happened. The man who killed your daughter disappeared.”

“He fled the country,” I tell him.

“I’m not trying to accuse you of anything,” he says, “but my point is I get the idea you’re the kind of man who does the right thing and not necessarily the legal thing. Am I right in thinking that?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Just answer the question, son,” he says.

I realize I’m holding my breath. I let it out loudly. “Mr. Chancellor, Harvey, if you have something to-”

“Just answer the question, son, and this can go a whole lot quicker.”

“The right thing.”

“Always?”

“I’ve answered. Now what is it you want to say?”

“There’s another letter.”

“What?”

Chancellor is nodding as he talks, only now the gesture is much bigger. “Caleb wrote my daughter another letter.”

“What kind of letter?”

“It would be six, maybe seven years ago. My wife, she doesn’t know about it. Nobody does. There’s something in it that I should have taken to the police back then, but I didn’t want to see anybody else hurt.”

“Who?”

“If I show you the letter, do I have your word you’re only going to use it to try and find Caleb, and nothing else?”

“I can’t promise anything like that without seeing it,” I say.

“Then forget I said anything,” he says. He reaches back for the door, but he doesn’t turn away. “And before you threaten me, I don’t have the letter. I threw it out and can’t really remember what it said, and by the time you fuck around with trying to find it it’ll all be too late to help anyway.”

“There are two girls’ lives on the line here,” I remind him. “One of them is eight years old, the other one only one.”

“I know. And another girl’s future. I don’t say this lightly, Detective. You have no idea how much I’ve gone through this in my mind over the years, always settling on an answer, then asking the question again just when I thought I was comfortable with it. Just hurry up and give me your word and then you can go and save them.”

I don’t know what is in the letter, but I know I’m not leaving here without it. “Okay, I promise, it stays between you and me.”

He stares at me and says nothing.

“I mean it,” I tell him. “I promise it’ll stay between you and me.”

“Wait here.”

He disappears. I stand on the doorstep getting colder. A few minutes go by. No doubt he thinks the letter is in one place when it’s in another. I pace the path up and down from the street to his door. My hands and feet are cold. I’d sit in my car and wait if it’d be any warmer than outside. Instead I sit on the front step and look at the letters he gave me. They’re hard to read because I can’t focus on them correctly. The letters seem a little blurred until I hold them further away from my face the way my dad used to do before he got glasses.

The letters are like Harvey said, the first one is dated three months after Cole was sentenced to jail. In it Cole tells Ariel he thinks she’s a brave little girl for dealing with what she went through, and he’s proud of her for running home and getting her mother to call the police. The second is almost a repeat of the first, only in it he wishes Ariel had run faster, or gone into the first house she saw rather than waiting to get home.

His third one describes what it’s like in jail. He had a very different experience from what I had. We were kept in different parts of the prison: I was in a high-risk ward with pedophiles and other prisoners with targets on their backs; he was in a high-violence ward because he was a cop killer. It’s not until the fourth one that the tone changes. He asks Ariel what she had been wearing on the day, who she had been flirting with, why she had brought the attack on herself and then deflected it by running away and leaving Jessica behind. There is a lot of hate and anger in the words, and Mr. and Mrs. Chancellor had every right to complain to the prison. The next letter he forgives her, only to change his mind in the following one. Prison gave him lots of time to think. It was making him crazy.

He calls her an angel. A slut. A princess. A whore.

Harvey Chancellor finally opens the door behind me. I stand up and he hands the letter to me along with a reminder of what I promised.

“What’s in here?” I ask.

“Victoria Brown,” he says. “We’ve heard her name on TV today, but it didn’t mean anything. But her job, that does. She’s not mentioned by name, but she’s in there,” he says, nodding toward the letter. “It was written after her assault.”

“And you didn’t tell the police?”

“No, I didn’t go to the police, Detective Inspector,” he says, sounding pissed off at me, “because the person who did it, she was innocent too. She didn’t ask for any of this. And you believe in payback, don’t you? That’s why I’m telling you, and that’s why you’re going to keep your promise.”

“Because?” I ask, looking down at the envelope.

“Because the person who put Victoria Brown into a coma,” he says, “is the little girl all of this started with. It was Tabitha Jenkins.”

The door swings open and Tabitha Jenkins gives Caleb a smile. It’s been seven years since the first and only time he saw her.

She has dyed her hair. She used to be blond, now it’s dark brown, the style still the same, and it looks good on her. It hangs over the side of her face and he can’t tell if she still has the scar Whitby gave her. She’s tanned too, from summer days spent in the sun, maybe working in the garden since the yard is full of well-groomed plants. She’s wearing worn jeans and a tight T-shirt and this little girl from all those years ago who visited him in jail is all grown up.