BRIGHT AND EARLY the next morning, I was at LightningKick, waiting for Gunner before it even opened. He showed up carrying a giant Thermos of green smoothie, and I had to wait what seemed like forever for him to finish it up, the whole time trying to chat with me about crap I didn’t care about.
The four-year-old class was getting canceled. An irate mom had broken one of the lockers when her kid complained about being sore from practice. The sparring dummy had a split in the neck and needed to be replaced and it was probably my fault, ha-ha-ha. The landlord wouldn’t fix the back door. Blah, blah, blah.
I sat on a metal folding chair in my dobok, nervously pumping one leg while chewing on my thumbnail. I’d driven home the evening before with one eye in the rearview mirror the entire way. I’d hardly gotten any sleep; every time Dad moved around downstairs or Hue sighed on the floor next to my bed, I was certain Heriberto was going to pull a Basile brother act on me and bust into my kitchen—only this time I wouldn’t get away with just a few bruises and a cut on my chest.
By the time morning came, practicing with Gunner seemed like the best possible use of my time. Not that I was afraid I was getting rusty or anything; I just needed to expend some of this nervous energy before it made me crazy.
Finally, Gunner rinsed out his cup in the tiny restroom and turned it upside down on a paper towel on the front desk to dry. He disappeared into the locker room, then reappeared in his dobok.
“You ready?” He stepped to one side by the mat and gestured for me to go first.
I stood, walked to the mat, and bowed. “Definitely ready.”
“Want to work on anything in particular?” he asked, following me to the heavy bag. I gave it a few tentative kicks.
Something I could use to defend myself from crazy Hollis wannabes and potential drug dealers. Something that could be used to defend myself from my own father, or any other murderer, for that matter. “Anything,” I said.
Gunner loped over to the equipment box and dug out a kicking pad. He held it in front of him and I worked on my power, gaining steam and momentum with every kick. Snap, snap, snap. Barely stopping to take breaths between, my hands balled up in front of my chin, my focus laser-sharp on the pads. Snap, snap, snap. After a while, Gunner had to change hands, shaking out the one that had been holding the pad.
“You haven’t lost your touch,” he said when I finally took a break. I was sitting on the folding chair again, sucking down a bottle of water as fast as I could. Sweat poured off me. It felt good. I was calming down, anyway. “How are your evasion techniques coming?”
I almost laughed out loud. I thought about running away from the man with white-blond hair at Pear Magic. If there was anything I was good at, it was evasion.
“I could probably work on that,” I said, tossing the empty bottle into recycling and heading back to the mat.
After a bow, Gunner settled into a fighting stance and moved to strike. I stopped him with a high block. He tried again and I used a middle knife hand. He reared back and threw a kick at me. Quick as lightning, I blocked him low. He threw some combinations and I blocked them all, taking the force of his kicks and strikes with my forearms, sending jolty thuds of pain up into my biceps, my chest. I ignored it. I had too much at stake to feel pain.
After a few minutes, he let his stance down. “Your blocks are great, but you need to work on getting out of the way,” he said. “Here, let me show you. Give me a forefist.”
I planted one foot behind me and punched. He ducked out of the way and I punched the air.
“Palm heel,” he said, straightening up again. I thrust my palm at him and he moved to the side. Again, my attack hit air. “Try a combination.”
“Sir?”
“Anything you’d like. Kicks, punches, whatever. Just go for it. You’re going to beat the snot out of me.”
I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and then unleashed two punches into the air, becoming so off balance I couldn’t even finish the combination.
“Yep, see, blocks are fine,” he said, taking my arm and smacking it solidly into his palm. “But it takes a lot of energy away from your next offensive move. Not to mention, it hurts. You evade”—he bent at the knees and moved side to side, like he was ducking under something—“and your opponent is the only one expending energy. You’ve thrown him off by not being where he thinks you’re going to be. He can’t even figure out where to punch next, and he’s off balance. It is almost impossible to beat someone who is evading you. If they’re good at it, that is. Let’s try it again. I’m going to attack you slowly.”
He began throwing slow-motion punches and kicks, and I swerved and bobbed and swiveled and shifted, at first too slow and getting hit anyway, but eventually getting better. Gunner was mostly punching air, even at moderate speed.
But all I could think about was Dad. He had been evading me for over ten years. It was going to be impossible to beat him as long as I kept letting him duck out of the way. He was throwing me off by never being where I thought he would be.
In other words, I’d put it off long enough. I had to listen to those tapes.
I DIDN’T WASTE any time when I got home. I was pretty sure Dad was out for the day, doing some freelance work for a travel magazine, but what I didn’t know was when he’d left or how long exactly he would be gone.
But what Gunner had said had made so much sense. Dad was evading. And I was done letting it throw me off balance.
I went straight up to my room and dug the manila envelope Chris had given me out of my desk drawer. I shook the tapes onto my desk. At first, all I could do was stare at them. I reached out to touch one, but my fingers shook slightly, almost like I was afraid.
No, Nikki. You have been afraid of too many things for too long. Time to step up. They’re tapes. What’s the big deal?
Oh, I could just find out that my dad killed my mom. No big deal there.
Still, I had to know.
I scooped up the tapes and took them to Dad’s room. Last I had seen his recorder, it was on a shelf in his closet. He never used it anymore, but I was pretty sure it would still be there anyway. I was suddenly glad the man was such a hoarder. I flipped on the closet light and stepped inside. It smelled like Dad. Cologne and aftershave and something chemical, like camera oil or lens cleaner or gasoline. And underneath it all, the faint scent of flowers that I associated with my mom. There was nothing left of her in this closet, so there was no way I was actually smelling anything. But the scent was there regardless—always there, always beckoning me, always making me feel hugged from the inside out. If Mom was watching right now, was she sad that I had found out the truth about her, about Peyton? Was she hoping I didn’t bust Dad? Or was she happy that I was finally going to get answers?
Putting the cart a little before the horse there, Nikki. You don’t actually know if he killed anyone, do you? You have to listen to the tapes. Save your judgment.
Yeah, but my judgment was telling me he was definitely lying about something. I’d seen the photos with my own eyes.
I could barely reach the shelf above Dad’s suit jackets—the one where he kept all kinds of odds and ends, along with a box of medicines and bandages and wraps—the things I was constantly needing when I was new to tae kwon do but we hardly ever used anymore. Pushed behind it all was a boxy cassette recorder—the old-fashioned kind that would have had a microphone that you plugged into it. He probably still had the microphone lying around somewhere, too.
I pulled it down, shoved everything back in its place, and brought the recorder to my bedroom. If he came home before I was finished with the recorder, I would just hide it under my bed. He would never know it was missing. He probably hadn’t used it in twenty years.
I crawled onto the middle of my bed and sat cross-legged, staring at the recorder and the cassettes and wondering if I was strong enough to handle whatever I found out. I would have to be.
My phone went off, making me jump. A text from Chris.
Looked up the plate.
And??? I texted.
The name sounds familiar. No record on her, though.
Her?
I waited for him to respond, but he never did. If there was a way to hear frustration in someone’s text voice, I was definitely hearing it in Chris’s. It had to be maddening to remember bits and pieces of things, but have the most random information wiped from your mind. Especially if the random information helped you figure out who was trying to kill you.
Address match? I asked.
Yes was all he responded. Translation: I’m done talking about it. I know nothing more than I did before.
I tossed my phone to the side and chewed my lip. If we didn’t have Luna or Heriberto, we might as well get my dad.
I put the cassette marked with a big 1 into the machine and pressed play.
At first there was nothing. Just the hiss of the tape and some faraway clicks and dragging noises. Then there was some mumbling—something garbled—and my dad’s voice came in, so loud and clear and close to the microphone it sounded like he was actually in the room with me. It made my heart skip.
“Uh, Milo Kill. M-I-L-O K-I-L-L.”
More mumbling, then a rustling and the voice coming in clearer. “. . . Thursday night?”
There was a pause. “Uh. I was home? I don’t know, maybe I was out. I . . . can I get a drink of water?” There was the sound of liquid being poured, and then, “Thanks.” A pause. “I mean, the whole week has been such a blur. I’m not sure what I remember. What’s real and what’s fake, you know?” A breath.
“So you don’t remember anything about the night your wife was murdered? Not even where you were?”
“I . . . I was with my daughter. With Nikki.”
I sat up straighter, staring at the recorder, which was bursting with gold fireworks, dripping gray contrails, and melting into a deep indigo sky. I pressed rewind and listened again. “. . . I was with my daughter.”
“Fucking liar,” I said out loud. I clicked off the tape, my entire room blotted out with inky rage. I had been at my friend Wendy’s house. Her mom had given me Tootsie Rolls in a bag. I’d dropped them in Mom’s blood. I remembered everything. Everything, down to the warmth of the blood as it soaked into the knees of my jeans. Down to the look in Mom’s eyes when she told me to run. And he couldn’t even remember that he wasn’t with me that night? “Bullshit,” I said to the recorder, hopping off my bed and pacing the length of my room a few times, my thumbnail jammed in my mouth. I looked longingly at my desk drawer, where I knew I’d stashed an old, stale pack of cigarettes. If there ever was a time I was saving them for . . .
Instead, I took several deep breaths and hit play again. “Well, now, see, we’ve been told your daughter was at a friend’s house, Milo. Were you with her at that house, or . . . ?”
“I . . .” A sigh. “I guess I must have been. I must have picked her up, dropped her off. That’s . . . I mean, I don’t know where else I would be.”
“Mrs. Coughlin—your daughter’s friend’s mother—has given a statement that she picked up your daughter and brought her home that day. She said you and your wife were going out on a date, and she’d agreed to do the driving so you two could be alone.”
A long pause. “She did?”
“Yep. So how about we start over. Do you know what you were doing . . .” On and on it went. A faceless officer asking Dad where he’d been the night Mom was killed, and Dad giving him every transparent lie in the book. At one point, Dad broke down, his tears sounding angry and frustrated. Calculated? Yes, maybe even measured.
I listened to both tapes, and never did Dad offer a believable story. And he’d offered so many unbelievable ones it was impossible to think that a believable one existed. Why? Why would he lie unless he was guilty?
“Am I being arrested?” he’d asked at one point, and the officer had sounded brusque when he responded, “No, sir. We’re just trying to get a sense of what happened that night. We don’t have anything to arrest you for, do we?”
Dad’s response had been chilling. His voice flat, impassive. “No. You don’t have anything.”
I let the second tape run until it reached the end. The machine gave a squeak and then clicked off, and I was left sitting in bloated silence in my room, my legs drawn up and my arms wrapped around them.
Not, No, I didn’t do it. Not, Whatever it takes to find my wife’s killer. Just, No, you don’t have anything. Which was definitely not the same as saying there was nothing to have.
He didn’t come out and say that he’d done it. He didn’t confess and throw himself on the mercy of the court. But he’d lied. He’d done nothing to convince me that he hadn’t done it.
I popped the cassette out of the machine and put it back in the manila envelope, then took the recorder back downstairs to Dad’s closet.
But when I moved the bandage box to put it back, I noticed a stack of yellowed, clipped newspaper articles under where the recorder had been sitting. I pulled them down. The headline on the very top one caught my eye.
PRODUCER PAIRS WITH UP-AND-COMER FOR HOT NEW THRILLER
Hollywood, CA—Noted producer Bill Hollis has announced his newest film venture—an as-yet-unnamed cat-and-mouse thriller about a professional football player who is hiding the fact that he’s a serial killer, and the young journalist who is next on his hit list. Hollis, best known for the 1994 Academy Award–winning Penelope, has paired with fledgling director Carrie Kill, in what he is calling his best work yet.
The article went on to name a short list of actors who were speculated to be in the film, and talked about Mom’s work at Angry Elephant. Below, there were two head shots—one of my mom and one of Bill Hollis. Seeing his face filled me with a familiar mix of anxiety and hatred, while Mom’s picture made me sad and nostalgic. The emotions swelled into a soup of colors that swam across the paper.
I flipped to the article beneath: BILL HOLLIS INTRODUCES NEW DIRECTOR TO HOLLYWOOD SCENE. Another photo of my mom, beaming into the camera. I kept flipping through the articles, all of them with similar headlines—wildly famous producer gives a shot to a nobody director, and wasn’t she lucky to be making what would be such a smash hit movie?
So . . . what had happened to this movie? As far as I knew, Mom was never part of anything that actually made it to the big screen. She was amateur until the day she died. I checked the dates of the articles. They were all written about two years before she died. Something had happened in those two years. Something that made the movie go south.
Dad? Had Dad happened?
I flipped to the last article and froze. The headline was similar to the others. Nothing new about the story. It was the photo that sent my stomach to my feet. The first photo that showed them together. Mom and Bill Hollis, arms around each other jovially. Off to one side, my dad, unaware that he was being caught on camera, a scowl driving down the corners of his mouth.
And behind him, the white-blond man.
Luna’s getaway driver. The director at Pear Magic. The guy with the VP belt buckle.
The man in one of the photos in Dad’s desk drawer. The ones that went missing.