We later learned that the rock that came hurtling through my mother’s bedroom window that night had come from his callused hands, the slits in my father’s truck tires the work of his blade. In his mind, it was his fault. He had slept with a married woman, after all, and within that same stretch of summer, her husband had murdered his daughter. Karma had been served, and the guilt was too much to bear. He was angry to his core. If Bert Rhodes had been able to get his hands on my father after he confessed to Lena’s murder, I’m positive he would have killed him, and not quickly. Not mercifully. He would have killed him slowly, painfully. And he would have enjoyed it.
But of course, he couldn’t. He couldn’t get his hands on my father. He was in police custody, safely locked behind bars.
But his family wasn’t, so he set his sights on us.
* * *
I unlock the front door now and peek my head into the house, searching for Daniel. I’m home before lunch, as promised, and I can smell fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen. I eye my laptop in the living room, and I want to grab it, open it, start typing furiously.
I want to learn more about Bert Rhodes.
He knew about Lena’s belly-button ring. He knew about the way my father looked at his daughter at the fair and at the school play and as she laid flat on my bedroom floor, those long legs in the air. All of the other girls—Robin, Margaret, Carrie, Susan, Jill—they were victims, too. But they were random. They were taken out of necessity or convenience or some mixture of the two. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time, the exact time the darkness crept in and my father could no longer fight it off—when he found the first young, innocent, defenseless girl he could get his hands on and he squeezed, hard, until it retreated back into the corner like a beetle scuttling away from the light. But Lena seemed to be more than that, she always had. With Lena, it was personal. She was his first. She was taken because of who she was, because of the way she made my father feel. The way she teased him with her waving fingers before she disappeared into a crowd; the way Bert teased him by sleeping with his wife before turning around and smiling at him in public, pretending to be friends.
I walk across the hall to the living room and sit on the couch, pulling my computer into my lap and powering it on. Bert Rhodes was violent, angry, unforgiving. Bert Rhodes had a grudge. Was he still stewing over this, twenty years later? He hadn’t forgotten my father’s crimes—and maybe he didn’t want us to forget them, either. I can’t shrug off the feeling that I’m onto something, so I tap my fingers across the keys, typing his name into the search engine and hitting Enter. A series of articles come up, almost all of them related to the Breaux Bridge killings. I scroll through the pages, skimming the headlines. They’re all outdated, and I’ve read them all before. I decide to refine my search to Bert Rhodes Baton Rouge and try again.
This time, a new result pops up. It’s the website for Alarm Security Systems, a Baton Rouge–based security company. I click on the link and watch as the website loads, reading the homepage.
Alarm Security Systems is a locally owned and operated on-demand security company. Our trained installation experts will personally install and monitor your home, 24/7, to keep you and your family protected.
I click on a tab titled Meet The Team and watch as Bert Rhodes’s face loads onto the screen. My eyes drink in his picture, his once-sharp jawline now padded with excess fat and saggy skin, stretched like pizza dough and left to hang. He looks older, fatter, balder. He looks terrible, to be honest. But it’s him. It’s definitely him.
Then, the realization hits me.
He lives here. Bert Rhodes lives here, in Baton Rouge.
I’m engrossed in his image, in the way he stares at the camera, the way his face completely lacks an expression. He’s neither happy nor sad nor angry nor irritated—he just is, a shell of a human. Empty inside. His lips droop into a gentle frown, his eyes emotionless and black. They seem to suck the light from the camera flash deep into their center instead of reflecting it back, the way the other pictures do. I lean closer to the monitor, so absorbed in the image on my screen, in this face from my past, that I don’t notice the sound of footsteps walking toward me.
“Chloe?”
I jump, my hand shooting to my chest. I look up to see Daniel hovering above me, and instinctively, I shut my computer. He glances at it.
“What are you looking at?”
“Sorry,” I say, my eyes darting from my computer and back to him. He’s fully dressed and holding a giant mug in his hands, staring at me. He pushes it in my direction, and I take it, reluctantly, even though I just downed a venti with Aaron thirty minutes before, and the caffeine—or at least, I think it’s the caffeine—is already making me jittery. I don’t answer, so he tries again.