Page 5 of The Death Row Club
2NICOLA
“IT SHOULD BE A CRIME.”Dishes clatter in my grandma’s sink. She’s probably elbow-deep in warm, soapy water, scrubbing the remains of hamburger casserole off her battered pan. “I watched last week’s episode, and the way she’s making you look—” A splash. “Shoot,” Grandma mutters, her voice now far from the receiver. “Have you looked into suing that Greer Woods woman? For… oh, what do you call it?”
“Slander?”
“Slander! Have you looked into suing her for slander?”
My gaze shifts to the pile of envelopes on the sideboard. On my last day of work, there was only a small stack; however, it’s since fattened into the leaning tower of financial ruin. I tried opening one yesterday, but the first few sentences (“You are at risk of losing your home to foreclosure…”) were enough to make me quit. If I can’t find the money to keep a roof over my head, how am I supposed to come up with attorneys’ fees? Besides, it’s not like I didn’t sign a release form. I gave the producers permission to use my name and face and words, all with no guarantee of compensation. Because I’m a goddamned idiot.
“It’s technically not slander,” I say, wandering into the kitchen and opening the cupboards. They’re nearly empty. “It’s editing.”
“Editing,” Grandma grumbles. “She’s making it look like you knew what that son of a bitch was doing.”
I flinch, but, of course, Grandma can’t see me from almost two thousand miles away.
“That man,” she spits. “I warned your mother not to marry him. When we were in the vestibule, about to walk down the aisle, I told her, ‘Laurel, honey, you can still change your mind,’ but she was nothing if not stubborn. She was brilliant, just brilliant, could’ve been anything.” She tsks. “He was a pitiful excuse for a husband.”
Silence on the other end of the line; I realize she’s waiting for me to agree with her. “Yeah, sure,” I say, but the words are flat and lukewarm. The truth is, my parents were in love. One of my earliest memories is hovering in the doorframe while they danced, barefoot, in the kitchen—a dishrag thrown over my father’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around my mother’s waist as she hummed along with the radio. He was a good husband; he was an even better father.
He also murdered five women.
I close the cupboards, no longer hungry for expired pretzels. I need to stop defending him. He lied to me, ruined my life. I should hate him. Why can’t I just fucking hate him?
“We should’ve fought for custody,” Grandma says. “After your mother died. You should’ve come down here and lived with us.”
“That’s actually what I called to talk to you about.” I sit at the kitchen table and pull the spigot on the boxed wine. It dribbles into my glass, then runs dry. “I was wondering if maybe I could come for a visit this weekend.”
Her pause stretches long enough to fill the whole room. “A visit?”
“Yeah. With the finale coming up, it’s getting a little tense here.”
“Hank, can you—” She calls for my grandpa. “Just a moment, Nicola.” She mutters something to him; he mutters back. Then she comes back on the line. “We’d love to have you come, really, but—”
My phone clatters onto the table. Grandma’s voice recedes into a muffled blur: “A pipe burst in the guest bathroom, and now we have contractors coming in and out at all hours. It’s just not a good time.”
I press the heels of my palms into my forehead. There’s no burst pipe, no contractors. There are only my grandparents, panicked about what the neighbors might think. It’s my own fault. I haven’t seen them in years, but still—they’re family. They’re supposed to be the last line of defense, the ones you can count on when everyone else has walked away.
“Nicola?” Grandma says, and I slowly lift the phone back to my cheek.
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“Funny. You know who said almost the exact same thing to me?”
No response.
“My dad. Right before he was arrested.”
I hang up without saying goodbye and replace the empty box of wine on the kitchen table with a full one.
Days pass; the situation only gets worse. I contact a property assessor to ask about selling the house and paying off the mortgage. “If you can sit on it for five, maybe ten years,” he says, “you should be able to recoup most of your original investment. Can you afford to rehab the facade?”
“No, and I can’t afford to wait, either. I need to sell as soon as possible.”
“Which house is this again?”
“The Fischer house.” When he doesn’t make the connection, I reluctantly add: “FromTo Catch a Killer?”
