Her eyes squinted. She tried to recreate the memory of the flash of light. Her imagination filled in the details. A private eye with a long, telescoping lens on his professional-looking camera. The click of the shutter as he captured Callie in her private moments. Reggie Paltz would develop the photos, take them back to Andrew. Would they both look at her images the way Buddy had? Would the two men use them somehow, some way, that Callie didn’t want to know about?
A loud bang sent her heart into her throat. Binx had knocked over one of the boxes that Phil had stacked around the room. Newspapers spilled out, magazine articles, crazy shit that Phil had printed from the internet. Her mother was a rabid conspiracy theorist. And Callie said that as someone who understood that rabies was a virtually fatal virus that caused anxiety, confusion, hyperactivity, hallucinations, insomnia, paranoia, and a fear of drinking fluids.
With the exception of alcohol.
Callie went to the door, which was padlocked from the inside. She dug the key out of her pocket. A handful of coins came with it. Leigh’s change from McDonald’s last night. Callie stared at the two dimes and three quarters, but her attention was elsewhere. She had to fight the urge to stand at the window again. Instead, she closed her eyes, pressed her head against the door, and tried to convince herself that she was on a bad trip.
Reality edged its way back in.
If Andrew’s private eye was watching her from the boarded-up house, wasn’t that exactly what Callie wanted? Reggie wouldn’t need to go to the motel and bribe Trap or interrogate Crackhead Sammy. He would not find out that she was working at Dr. Jerry’s. He would not talk to her customers on Stewart Avenue. He would not tap his friends in the police force to maybe look into her and maybe find out what she’d been up to. His investigation would stop right at Phil’s doorstep.
Callie opened her eyes. The coins went back into her pocket. She jammed the key into the lock and twisted it open. Binx scooted up the hallway en route to a pressing appointment. Callie closed the door, put the padlock on the outside. She clicked it shut, then pulled on the hasp to double check that her mother couldn’t break into her room.
It was like being a kid again.
The gurgle of saltwater aquarium filters got louder as she made her way up the hall. Leigh’s bedroom had been turned into Sea World. Dark blue walls. Light blue ceiling. A beanbag chair with Phil’s stringy outline was in the center of the room, offering a panoramic view of tangs, clownfish, firefish, damselfish, coral beauties, swimming through hidden treasures and sunken pirate ships. The smell of pot draped down from the ceiling. Phil liked to get stoned in the dark, wet room, lolled across the beanbag chair like a tongue.
Callie checked to make sure her mother wasn’t nearby before going into the room. She peeled back a corner of blue foil covering the window. She knelt down so she could peer out at the boarded-up house. The angle was better from Leigh’s room, less conspicuous. Callie could see a piece of plywood had been pulled away from one of the front windows, revealing an opening large enough for a man to crawl through.
“Well,” Callie said to herself. She couldn’t recall if the plywood had been in that position the night before. Asking Phil would probably send her mother into a delusional rage.
She slid her phone out of her back pocket and took a photo of the house. Callie used her fingers to zoom in on the front window. The plywood had splintered when it was pulled back. There was no way of telling when it had happened short of getting a degree in forensic wood splintering.
Should she call Leigh?
Callie played out the possible conversation, the might-have-seens and could’ve-beens and all the other half-baked theories that would wind up Leigh’s cymbal-clanging inner monkey. Her sister was meeting with Andrew this afternoon. Leigh’s boss would be there. She would have to walk a razor’s edge. Calling her now, passing on what could be a methadone delusion, seemed like a really bad idea.
The phone returned to her pocket. She pressed the edge of the foil back down over the window. She walked into the living room, where the menagerie continued. Roger stuck his head up from the couch and barked. There was a new dog beside him, another terrier mix, who gave exactly zero fucks when Callie patted his scruffy head. She smelled bird shit, though Phil was religious about cleaning out the three large cages that gave a dozen budgies pride of place in the dining room. Callie gathered by the burn of cigarette smoke that Phil had taken up her position in the kitchen. No matter how well her mother tended to her beloved animals, every single creature living in this goddam house was going to die from secondhand smoke.