Falls The Shadow

59

In the interstices of the American landscape, we have built our cathedrals. Upon useless wedges of real estate they sprawl, upon the trash-strewn boundaries between one exurb and the next, upon land fit neither for human nor for beast. Squat, rectangular, with cinder-block wall and steel door, the monuments of our age have risen to embrace the very stuff of the American dream. And what is that exactly? Why, stuff itself.

E-Zee Self Store sat just off a highway near the town of Exton, Pennsylvania. I stood before the red corrugated-steel door of unit 27 as the hiss and vroom of highway traffic rose and fell behind me. Weeds to the left of me, desolation to the right, here I was, officially nowhere. Exton. But behind the red steel door, I believed, might be a message from a murderer.

It was on the plane home from Chicago, with the stink of the Pepper household still in my nose and the certainty in my gut that Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, that I realized the message might exist. I was sitting back in the seat, arms folded, trying to figure it all out, the whole horrid story, when I felt this jabbing in my chest. I ignored it as best I could as I struggled to come up with an explanation for why Dr. Bob would murder Leesa Dubé. Had she betrayed him in some way? Had she rejected him somehow? Had she failed to floss?

None of it made much sense, except that he had done it. It wasn’t François, it wasn’t Velma, it wasn’t the mythical Clem, it was Bob. The similarities were too similar to be a coincidence, two murders that somehow involved Bobby Pepper, the picture of the murderous husband gripped in the murdered wife’s hand. It was his way to deflect blame, almost a reflexive action. How do you frame the husband for a murder you committed? Reach into your past, pull out a trick. Yes, Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, but why?

Blaming the murder on the dead woman’s dentist, without a motive, wasn’t going to help François, it was just going to make us all look desperate and pathetic. I needed a why. I sat back in my seat and crossed my arms and let the question rattle about my brain. Even as I felt something jab into my chest, I ignored the pain and tried to think it through.

There was an image I couldn’t shake, hadn’t been able to shake since I left that sad Chicago house, and I let it overwhelm me for a moment. The three Pepper children hiding in the closet as the fights between father and mother rage. And little Bobby Pepper, peering out the crack of the door, wanting to step in and stop it, wanting to save his mother from the brutality of his father, wanting to do something. Yet stopped, stopped by his older brother, tied up to stop him, helpless within the closet, watching his life tear itself apart. I like to help, he often said, and suddenly you could understand why. But what did that have to do with Leesa? Was she stopping him somehow? Was she threatening to tell about something? What? Why had he killed her? It again all came down to the why. Sitting in that plane, I thought it through, and I came up with, and I came up with…

Nothing. Not a damn thing. Except for the point that was jabbing into my chest. I uncrossed my arms, reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out a thin piece of metal.

The key that had been sent to me as if I had lost it, except it had never been mine. I held it in my hand and turned it over and again. The bronze caught a shard of sunlight from the window and threw it straight into my eye. I had mentioned to Whit that I was worried about Beth, and next thing you know Dr. Bob was telling me all about Beth’s painful past. I had mentioned to Whit that I was wondering about François’s missing stuff, and lo and behold, as soon as my Clem defense crumbles, like a message from on high comes a key. I held it out in front of me and looked at it closely, as if maybe it had an answer for everything. And surprise, surprise, maybe it did.

E-ZEE.

With that key in my hand, I leaned down and unlocked the padlock of E-Zee Self Store unit 27. I pulled up the door and stepped inside and switched on the light and closed the door behind me and found myself smack in the middle of a puzzle.

The space was about the size of a two-car garage, with cinder-block walls and a cement floor. Stuff was massed in dusty piles, all kinds of stuff, cartons, couches, a brass lamp with its pleated shade askew, spotted mattresses along with their box springs, pots and pans, strange masks, big copper bowls, a computer, a headboard, leaning towers of books, a large ceramic Dalmatian. But it wasn’t the amount of the junk in the piles that surprised – indeed, the amount was just what I expected, create a space for junk in America and America will fill it – but it was the way the piles were formed. Everything was jammed up against the walls, stacked high in teetering heaps that reached almost to the ceiling, so that in the middle of the unit was created a clearing.

And in that clearing, like a tableau of the ordinary in an avant-garde museum, was situated a La-Z-Boy chair and a six-pack of beer and a television and a VCR, the latter two connected to an extension cord that ran up to the light fixture in the ceiling.

Now, this was most peculiar. All of the contents of the unit, including the chair and television and beer, were covered in the same layer of dust, so nothing had been moved or touched in years. But why was this chair here, this television and VCR, the beer? Someone with a key had pushed everything to the walls and set up the television for viewing. Who? When? For whose viewing? And for viewing what? And even if it was clearly set up this way long before I first met François Dubé, why did I feel as if it had all been set up for me?

See what I mean about the puzzle?

In the cleared area were two boxes, one cardboard and one wooden. I opened the cardboard box first and immediately recoiled. I knew now what Mrs. Cullen meant when she talked about toys. Harnesses and cuffs, rings and electrical devices with long dangling cords, a hodgepodge of bizarrely shaped phallic toys made of metal, plastic, silicone, leather, all well worn, all enough to make me sick to my stomach. So tell me this, is there anything more disgusting than someone else’s used sexual devices?

I quickly closed it up and kicked it aside, then I stooped down to the wooden box, which sat beside the VCR. I lifted off the top. A box of videotapes, about twenty in all. I went through them, one by one. Fantasia? Sillyville? Magical Musical Mansion? Yes, tapes to keep the daughter happy when she came for a visit. Park her in front of the telly, press play, watch her pupils dilate.

But there were other videos, with less childlike names. Sodomania 36. Aim to Please. Sluts with Nuts 5. Succubus. Oh My Gush 7.And the ever-popular Bad Mama Jama. Nice. Let’s just hope he never intended to show his daughter Snow White and by accident slipped in Nubian Nurse Orgy instead.

And then there were a series of videocassettes without preprinted labels or covers, cassettes with French words scrawled across white labels, some of the labels badly stained with spots of something that looked like coffee. At least I hoped it was coffee. Yuck. Home movies of birthday parties and the like or something a little less innocent, though no less staged? I remembered the inventory found in the apartment at the time of François’s arrest, the video camera with tripod and lights but no videos. Now here they were, waiting for me.

I turned on the television, powered up the VCR, slipped in one of the self-labeled tapes. While I was waiting to see what was what, I sat down in the chair, pulled a beer from out of the cardboard six-pack holder, blew away the dust, twisted off the cap, took a whiff.

Skunk city. Ugh.

I twisted the cap back on, replaced it, leaned back in the La-Z-Boy, rested my shoes on the conveniently risen footrest.

Static, then the swelling music and HBO logo indicating the showing of a feature presentation, then a blank screen for a moment, before a fixed shot of a bedroom appeared on the screen. I had never seen the bedroom before, but I recognized it right off, what with the same brass lamp with pleated shade, the same headboard, the same ceramic Dalmatian that stood in the piles pushed to the walls. François’s bedroom. No clap from the clapper, no shout of “Quiet on the set and… action,” but it wasn’t needed, was it? First there’s nothing but the bedroom, then an entrance from stage left.

Gad.