There were a few people in the lobby—a family of three, an elderly couple. They all froze in place staring.
Quentin walked over to the front desk, his head down, his fists clenched. The mother drew her child closer as he passed.
“Jesus,” the elderly man whispered. “What a nut.”
“Sorry,” Quentin said to the clerk, though it hardly seemed enough.It’s not me, he wanted to say. Because this wasn’t him. He wasn’t like this. Something was happening to him here on the East Coast. Something dark inside him, surfacing.
Without a word, the clerk held up a FedEx package, his name and the address of the hotel scrawled on the front in Summer’s impatient handwriting. “Thank you,” Quentin said, remembering it now—Summer telling him over the phone about overnighting him reading material. “I was just... I went to a funeral today...” he said. “I’m a little out of sorts.”
The clerk didn’t respond, and Quentin didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t have. He headed for the elevator, his face wet and burning, guests whispering behind his back.
Once he got back into his room, Quentin put the package aside, opened the desk drawer, removed a piece of stationery, and wrote a long letter to Reg Sharkey. He put it into an envelope and found Reg’s address in the contacts on his phone. He took it downstairs and left it with the desk clerk, giving him enough money to send it first class, plus an extra twenty for “putting up with me being such an asshole,” which finally earned him some eye contact and a smile. “No worries,” the guy said.
Only then, when he was back in his room, did he think about opening the package Summer had sent.
Inside was an old paperback book, accompanied by a note from Summer that simply read: FOUND IT! Quentin looked at the book. The cover had bursts all over it:A special from the editors of The Asteroid! The true story of the Killer Lovers! Soon to be a Movie of the Week!And in the midst of them all, the title:The Inland Empire Killers: ’Til Death Do Us Part.
“God, you’re so good, Summer,” Quentin whispered.
He opened the book and read, losing himself in the lurid prose, the carefully chosen details. Gabriel LeRoy’s lisp, how it had made him subject to bullying as a kid; the long walks a fourteen-year-old April Cooper liked to take, pushing her baby sister, Jenny, in a stroller, in a bid to escape her stern, somber home. The bloodlust that had consumed April and Gabriel both, making them forget their weaknesses as individuals and turning them into a single, murderous entity, “a two-headed monster, fueled by rage.”
He read until the sun began to set and his room grew dark, feeling as though he were on the run with Gabriel and April—Gabriel gripping the wheel of one of many stolen cars, the jumbled thoughts running through his brain as April egged him on, encouraging his madness, driven mad as she was by the untimely death of her mother and the feeling that her stepfather loved Jenny—his biological child—so much more than her... He devoured it all, facts and fiction, direct quotes and clear instances of poetic license and paragraphs, pages, where you couldn’t tell the difference, truth and lies bleeding into each other, all to tell the best possible story. Much like a podcast. Much like life.
Quentin was in the final third of the book and feeling bleary-eyed and hungry when a paragraph jumped out at him:
The blood from the gas station murders barely washed from their hands, the killer couple found solace in a roadside diner, where Gabriel relished a plate of steak and eggs and a side of apple pie, washed down with a cheap beer. April’s last meal on the road was more delicate: cinnamon raisin toast and cream cheese, with strawberry jam. “She said her mother used to make it for her,” recalls Gretchen Philips, the waitress who served them. “She said it was her favorite dish.”
“Comfort food,” Quentin whispered.
He removed Nicola Crane’s business card from his pocket and stared at it: A name. A phone number. A P.O. box. The utter lack of information. And he’d never asked her about that—something he normally would have done. He’d gone on and on about himself, his family, without learning about hers. Had she engineered that?
He thought of Nicola’s voice, the honeyed sound of it, so similar to Renee’s. He recalled her tanned, lined face and her sturdy body,but with something so familiar beneath those years of workmanlike muscle, the skin like broken-in leather. Something Quentin knew.
He turned to the middle section of the book and stared at the winter formal picture—April Cooper in her ruffled dress, pale and bony and unformed.
“Is that you?” he whispered to April Cooper’s serious young face. “Is that you, Nicola?”
Sixteen
June 16, 1976
2:00A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
There’s this ride at Disneyland. It’s called Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and it’s supposedly for little kids. Here’s how it goes: You get in this car with a cute little frog, and everything seems like it’s going to be loads of fun. But the problem is—and this is a huge problem—frogs can’t drive. They can’t even reach the pedals. So, you and the frog end up on this horrible trip where you’re nearly crashing into trees and making fire hydrants explode and getting chased by cops... until finally you get into a deadly car accident and you both wind up in hell.
Does that sound like a little kids’ ride to you? (I’m not kidding about the hell part either. The very last part of Mr. Toad is orange and red flames and little red demons dancing around and everything.)
Anyway, one of my earliest memories is going on that ride with my mom. My real dad had left years earlier, when I was just a baby. Papa Pete wasn’t in the picture yet, so itwas just her and me back then. I was maybe three or four and when the car started swinging around, I got so scared I started to cry. By the time we got to hell, I was sobbing. But Mom put her arms around me and hugged me tight and said, “It’s only a ride. It’s not real. Nothing like this could ever happen.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
I stopped crying because if there was one thing I knew about Mom, it was that she always kept her promises to me. So many people had let her down in her life, and she didn’t want me to grow up sad like her. She wanted me to feel as though the world was a good place where people kept their word and anything was possible. I believed her. I trusted her with every little cell in my body. I loved her with all that I had.
But then she got into a car accident and died.
