Chapter 4: Someone Who Knew the House
I sent the guests home.
I did it calmly, with a smile I did not feel, telling the other mothers that Baxter wasn't feeling well and we'd reschedule.
They gathered their children with the careful speed of people who had heard enough to know they should leave.
One woman squeezed my arm on the way out.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't need to.
Baxter I sent upstairs with the baby monitor on, the volume turned all the way up, and his tablet loaded with the show he liked.
I told him the party wasn't over, just moving inside.
He looked at me for a moment, then nodded, and went.
He didn't ask questions.
That still frightened me more than anything Calhoun had said.
I came back to the kitchen.
Calhoun was at the table.
Hester was standing near the window with her arms crossed, looking out at the ruined backyard.
"Start talking," I said.
Calhoun spread his hands on the table.
"Fourteen months ago I found a key."
"A key."
"In your coat pocket.
The gray one you don't wear anymore.
It wasn't a house key and it wasn't a car key.
I didn't recognize it.
So I had it checked."
"You had my coat pocket checked."
"It was a key to a storage unit.
In Millfield.
Registered under a name I didn't recognize." He paused.
"A man's name."
I sat down.
"Go on."
"I hired Marcus to look into the unit.
It took him three weeks to get access.
When he did—" Calhoun stopped.
He picked up his phone, opened something, and slid it across the table to me.
Photographs.
A storage unit interior.
Shelves.
Boxes.
And on the far wall, pinned in a neat grid, photographs of Baxter.
Dozens of them.
From infancy through last spring.
School.
The park.
Our front yard.
The backyard through the fence.
My vision went strange at the edges.
"The unit was rented under the name Daniel Fosse," Calhoun said.
"I didn't know that name.
But my mother did."
I looked up at Hester.
She turned from the window.
For the first time since the backyard, she looked her age.
"Daniel Fosse is my sister's son," she said.
"My nephew.
He is thirty-four years old and he has been in and out of psychiatric care since he was nineteen." She said it flatly, like she had rehearsed it.
"I cut contact with him seven years ago.
I thought that was the end of it."
"Why does he have photographs of my son on a wall?"
Hester's jaw tightened.
"Because he believes Baxter is his."
The refrigerator hummed.
Upstairs, faintly, I could hear the sound of Baxter's show.
"That is insane," I said.
"Yes," Hester said.
"It is.
Clinically.
Literally.
He has constructed an entire history inside his mind.
He has documentation he made himself.
He has convinced himself that you and he had a relationship before you met Calhoun.
None of it is real.
But he believes it completely."
"And you knew about this man."
"I knew he was unstable.
I did not know he had fixated on your family until Calhoun came to me fourteen months ago."
I turned back to Calhoun.
"You went to her before you came to me."
He didn't answer.
"You found a storage unit full of photographs of our child and you went to your mother."
"I needed to understand what I was dealing with before—"
"Before you told me that my son was being stalked." My voice came out very level.
"You made that choice.
You decided I didn't need to know.
For fourteen months."
"I was trying to protect you."
"You were protecting yourself from a conversation you didn't want to have."
Hester moved toward the table.
"The situation is more complicated than—"
"Sit down," I said.
"Both of you.
Because I have not finished."
They sat.
"Where is Daniel Fosse right now?"
Calhoun's phone buzzed on the table between us.
The screen lit up.
MARCUS DELL.
"Answer it," I said.
He did.
He put it on speaker.
Marcus Dell's voice was flat and professional and completely without comfort.
"He's not at the unit," he said.
"I went this morning.
It's been cleared out.
Every photograph.
Every document.
All of it.
He knew someone had been in there."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"There's something else," Marcus said.
"I pulled his phone records from the carrier contact I have.
He made eleven calls in the last three days.
Ten of them were to the same number." A pause.
"The number is registered to this address."
I looked at Hester.
May you like
Her face had gone the color of old ash.
"Someone in this house," Marcus said, "has been talking to him."
