She opened her eyes. Gasped in a mouthful of warm air. Callie’s arms were shaking so hard she was afraid they wouldn’t support her much longer. She rolled to her side, lining up her body along the narrow joist like a cat balancing on the back of a couch. She looked at the underside of the roof. Nails spiked through the wood where the shingles had been pounded in. Water stains spread like dark thought bubbles above her head.
The beautiful origami swan was gone, devoured by the malicious gorilla, but Callie could not suppress the truth any longer.
She turned the light not straight ahead, but to the side. She pushed up on her elbow, making herself look over the beam, back toward the access panel. A plastic cutting board spanned two joists. Callie’s hand went to her stomach. She could still feel where the gouged plastic had scratched across her belly when she’d first crawled into the attic.
She remembered the large cutting board from Linda Waleski’s kitchen. It had been on the counter one day then gone the next, and Callie had assumed that Linda had decided it was easier to throw it away than to clean it.
But now she understood that Buddy had stolen the board for his attic project.
Callie used the light to follow the rat-chewed cable that trailed back to the board. Without any other information, she knew that a VCR had been placed on the plastic. She knew that the gray, three-pronged RCA cable had hung down from the jacks on the front of the machine. Red for the right audio channel. White for the left audio. Yellow for video. The cable threaded into one long wire that now stretched in pieces back in Callie’s direction, then took a turn to the left.
She followed the cable, inching on her elbows until her body lay across the joists instead of alongside them. The space narrowed even more. She used the light to examine the back of the Sheetrock. There wasn’t enough room to get anything but a harsh reflection off the shiny brown paper. She tucked the phone into her pocket, sending the attic into darkness.
Even with that, Callie still closed her eyes. She ran her fingers along the flat surface. Almost immediately, she found a shallow indentation. Over time, something had left an impression in the soft pulp of the Sheetrock. Something two inches round, the same size as the focus ring on a camera. The same kind of camera that plugged into the end of the chewed cable that wound back to the missing VCR.
She heard movement below. Leigh was in the kitchen. Callie listened to her sister’s footsteps crunching against the grit on the floor. Leigh was standing where the table and chairs had been. A few steps forward and she’d be at the sink. A few steps back and she’d be by the wall where the kitchen phone used to be.
“Callie?” Leigh turned her phone upward. A beam of light shone through the hole in the ceiling. “What did you find?”
Callie did not respond.
What she had found was the answer to both of their rock-bottom questions.
Andrew knew everything because he had seen everything.
Wednesday
10
Leigh looked at the clock. It was exactly eight in the morning and rush-hour traffic was already tangling up the roads. She was back behind the wheel of her Audi but, for the first time in days, she no longer felt like she was drowning on dry land. Leigh’s sense of relief ran counter to what Callie had found in the Waleskis’ attic last night, but Andrew had already made it clear that he knew the intimate details of his father’s murder. What Leigh had not known, what had pushed her to the brink of insanity, was how he knew. Now that Leigh had the how, Andrew was robbed of some of the power he held over her.
That Callie had been the one to give Leigh the leverage made it even sweeter. Her sister’s observation that Andrew didn’t have a secret army of drones in the sky had clicked something in Leigh’s head. At eighteen, she had been woefully unfamiliar with the basics of house construction. There were walls and floors and ceilings and somehow the water got to the faucet and the electricity got to the lights. She had not yet been forced to navigate a crawlspace looking for the water shut-off valve because her husband had chosen that weekend to visit his mother. She had never hidden Christmas presents in the attic to keep them secreted away from a very curious and clever little girl.
From the moment Andrew had reappeared in her life, Leigh had been going through that horrible night of the attack over and over again trying to see what they had missed. Until that moment on the swings, it had never occurred to her that they had looked everywhere but up.
After that, there were no surprises. Every Christmas during high school, Leigh had worked at the audio/visual department at Circuit City. They got paid on commission, so Leigh had worn a tight shirt and blown out her hair to attract the hapless men who’d wander in at the last minute looking for something expensive to buy their wives that they could actually use for themselves. She had sold dozens of Canon Optura camcorders. Then she had sold storage cases, tripods, cables, extra batteries, and VHS tapes because the mini-cassettes only held around ninety minutes of video, so you either had to erase the content or back it up.