Page 6 of The Death Row Club
“Oh.” He heaves out a breath. “Between you and me? I’d cut my losses. You won’t be able to give that house away.”
I discover that some of our neighbors are selling memorabilia on eBay: work orders from the hardware store with my dad’s signature atthe bottom, greeting cards with “Hope you have an amazing day” and “Sorry for your loss” scribbled inside in his hand. A list of instructions he wrote for how to install a new refrigerator has a current bid of two thousand dollars. I look around our house and wonder how much money is here.
No, gross. Don’t do that. Bad enough everyone else is trying to monetize us. These are our memories—not collectibles for strangers to paste into their morbid little scrapbooks. Our lives shouldn’t be for sale.
The pile of envelopes looms by the front door.
Maybe… maybe if I only listed junk we were planning to get rid of anyway. I’ve been meaning to clean out the house, get it ready for sale—or foreclosure. Inside the sideboard drawers are papers that were ripped off legal pads, notebooks with only the first few pages written on, crumpled-up receipts. I pull out the first one and start reading: “To-Do List (Wed): Take out trash, make dentist appointment, build easels for Nic’s classroom…” I slide the page off to one side. Next come bills for my graduate school program, all paid by my father. This is why we’re in debt, why we’re going to lose our house. Because he was willing to do whatever it took to support me. I rub my shirtsleeve across my eyes.
Interred in the back of the drawer is a Polaroid photo from last year: the three of us—Dad, Greer Woods, and me—sitting on the duct tape–patched couches at Striker’s bowling alley. A basket of fries wilts in the center of the table, watery ketchup seeping into a paper plate. Her chin is propped in her palm, and while you can’t tell in the photo, her rental shoe’s tapping against mine like a pendulum. The memory echoes through my bones, and my toes clench, as if reaching for something that’s no longer there. Now that the show’s airing, now that we’ve all become minor celebrities, this photo would probably net the most profit.
It goes back into the drawer.
In the end, I assemble a pile of around seventy items that could be sold online. If I throw them away, there’s no guarantee that one of our neighbors won’t break open the bag and loot our trash. They’ll end up on eBay anyway, and I’ll be just as broke as I am now. At least, that’s what I tell myself as I snap photos of each item and type up brief descriptions. I pull a blanket off the couch and over my head before pressing the upload button. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but it feels like the most brutal kind of betrayal.
The following morning, I check to see how much money’s waiting in my bank account. I find an email in my inbox instead:
Your listings were removed: Offensive material policy.
Hello Nicola, We had to remove your listings because they didn’t follow our offensive material policy. Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t permitted.
A quick search for the listings I browsed yesterday, posted by other sellers, reveals most of them have been removed as well.
I sift through the papers piled next to me: a napkin sketch of a shelving unit, a patient wristband from Oliante Memorial, a menu from the Country Club Family Restaurant. Nothing about the murders, just the jetsam of an ordinary life. So then what makes these materials offensive? Is it my father? Has his very existence somehow become offensive?
Has mine?
I consider the comment posted on social media thousands of times since the arrest: “Kill yourself.” What else is there to do when the world has decided your very presence can no longer be tolerated?
I toss the papers back into the sideboard drawer. So much for thatplan to stave off the creditors. Cautiously, I lift my fingers to the edge of the curtain and push it aside. The news vans are still parked outside. Two reporters lean against ABC 7’s vehicle, chuckling; another sits in the back of NBC 4’s, scrolling through her phone.
I could always talk to them. An exclusive interview. There have been more than a few offers slid under our front door—thousands of dollars if only I’d be willing to answer their questions: When did you know something was wrong with your father? What was it like being raised by a serial killer?
The same as being raised by anyone else. They’ll be looking for some revelation about how he abused me, but he never so much as raised his voice. Well, almost never. Back in high school, before I learned how to drive, I used to walk an hour to and from the nearest bus stop. One night, it started raining, and without a poncho or umbrella, I was soaked straight through to my bra. When an elderly couple pulled over and asked if I wanted a lift, I didn’t hesitate to crawl into the back seat. My father, waiting on the porch, thanked them for getting me home safe. But the moment they drove away, he rounded on me: “How could you be so fucking stupid?” I was stunned; my father wasn’t a religious man, but he never swore. It just wasn’t in his nature. “Don’t you know not to get into cars with strangers? Do you want to end up like that girl on the news?”
Heather Dickerson. She’d left her friend’s house late one night and somewhere between there and her front door, she disappeared. Almost a week later, they found her floating facedown in Ellicott Creek. That must’ve been hard for him, I thought, as I peeled off my clothes and left them in the bathroom to dry. Seeing her photo on TV, only a few years older than his own daughter, and wondering if the same thing could happen to me. His anger was understandable; he was trying to keep me safe from dangerous men.
I let the curtains fall closed now. I can’t agree to an interview—even if it would solve all my financial problems. I haul the box of wine into the living room, pour myself a fresh glass, and load up one of those reality shows about families with umpteen kids. My mind slowly goes numb as the TV mother bulk-prepares fourteen school lunches. This was the kind of family my parents wanted; it’s what killed my mother in the end—a risky pregnancy that she refused to terminate, despite my father’s reservations. I blamed myself as much as he did, unable to understand why I hadn’t been enough for them, but now, as an adult, I find myself longing for a TLC household of my own. I imagine a younger brother sitting next to me on the couch, one with my dad’s overcast-blue eyes. “It’s okay,” he’d tell me. “We’ll find a way out together.” I imagine a younger sister stirring up mac and cheese on the stove. “He’s not how they make him out to be on the news,” she’d say. “He’s gentle, selfless, and he loves you so very much. We know. We were there, too.”
No one else was there. It was just me and him. Which means anyone can come along and rewrite his story. How long before I stop trusting my own memories, before I start accepting NBC 4’s or ABC 7’s versions of the truth?
When the box is empty, I push myself upright and stagger out the back door, into the night. In the corner of the yard is the playhouse my dad built for me in first grade. When it turned out I wasn’t interested in cooking plastic food on my Fisher-Price stove, he dug a ditch around it, deep enough to double as a swimming hole in the sweltering summer months, poured some concrete, and repurposed it into a fortress. He brought me to the hardware store, mixed up little sample cans of paint, and together, we traced a fearsome dragon onto the front.
Now, paint peels from the dragon’s spine, curling inward like knobby vertebrae. The water in the moat’s furred in a thin layer of algae, dead crane flies skimming across the surface, their long legscricked upward. I slide myself into the murk. It’s cold, but the alcohol serves as a layer of insulation. I let my feet drift from the bottom and float onto my back.
The stars swirl above me, like glitter trapped in a mason jar. I pick out the five brightest and use my fingertip to draw lines between them. Five stars. Five dead women. In college, I became obsessed with the Ellicott Creek Ripper case. Learned everything I could about the victims: the clubs they belonged to, the classes they were enrolled in, their after-school jobs. Grilled their friends for any information that might’ve been left out of the newspapers. Worked out timelines for what occurred the nights of the murders.
I point to the first star. Heather Dickerson. In his confession, my dad said it’d been raining, and he offered her a ride home. He drove down a deserted road, and when she tried to break free, he pushed her down and strangled her. He left her in Ellicott Creek, hoping the water would destroy any evidence left behind. That weekend, I was in Corpus Christi visiting my grandparents. When my flight landed, he was waiting in arrivals, wearing his Carhartt jacket that was fraying around the cuffs. He hugged me tight, smelling like engine grease and foamy Barbasol shaving cream.
My finger sweeps to the next star. Jody Hill. She used to buy ice cream at Double Dips, the walk-up stand across from the hardware store. My dad claimed he was delivering some lumber to her neighbors and asked if she wanted a lift. He switched to a knife that time—punctured one of her lungs with the first stab. By then, I’d left for college. That night, I was in one of the shared studio spaces on campus. While she was suffocating, I was gluing strips of balsa wood together for sculpture class.
The third star. Rebecca Stoeffel. She left field hockey practice to find her tires slashed. My dad was parked nearby, volunteered to help. She bled out in his back seat; I think he mentioned scrubbing downthe upholstery during one of our phone calls, claiming he’d nicked himself with a table saw or something, but I can’t be sure. It’s hard to tell if my memories—memories of moments that seemed so inconsequential at the time—are accurate, or if I’m filling in the blanks with what I imagine happened.
The fourth star. Lauren Kaminski. She was the only one who didn’t choose to get into my dad’s truck. He followed her to a local trailhead, waited until she was alone, then tackled her from behind and dragged her into the woods. Claire and I bought king-sized pizza slices that night—ones that were so big and greasy, they drooped flaccidly in our hands—and scarfed them down on a bench in Riverside Park. We talked until the early hours of the morning, until joggers started pounding the pavement before work, headphone cords flapping in time with their steps.
My hand drops into the water, but my gaze still lands on the fifth star. Claire Tenenbaum. My best friend.
My father’s confession was televised. Even though each word felt like a knife raking between my ribs, I forced myself to watch—but when he reached Claire, I wrenched the cord clean out of the wall. I didn’t need to know the details, still don’t. Suffice to say, Claire went for a ride with him and never came back.
