“Hurry, I don’t have time to mess around with you,” his mother yelled and stormed out. “I have to take your sister to her school and check up on Michelle at the hospital. She almost choked to death after she fell asleep eating a hot dog.”
That woke him. “What? Is she alright?”
“What do you care?” she stepped into his doorway and considered him intently.
Long ago, Jon had mastered the art of the unintelligent blank stare. A man under as much enemy scrutiny as himself needed a defensive mechanism, a fallback face to deflect any suspicion. It was a masterful expression. Blank unintelligent surprise with a touch of sadness at the corners. The eyes mutely crying how can you suspect me? It had gotten him out of more than one jam. This time, Mother bought it.
“Father is down there now threatening a lawsuit. They’re trying to put her in rehab or some Narcotics Anonymous bullshit. We’ll have to slam the sue hammer down on them.”
His younger sister appeared briefly behind her mother’s legs and stuck her tongue out at him, then ran down the stairs giggling with evil intent. His mother burrowed into his blank face, mentally trying to tear it away and expose some dark guilt. Her brow furrowed and lips pinched in concentration, but the eternal enemy, time, got in the way. She glanced at her watch and stomped off. The front door slammed. Now that the source of tension had evaporated, blackness claimed Jon.
He snorted awake sometime later, still sitting propped up against the bed. The alarm clock was blaring, must have been for hours. He wiped the crud from his eyes. 11:30. Christ, half the day gone. Well, no point in going now. The way punishment worked at the school, missing part of the day was as bad as the whole of it, so he might as well take full advantage. The malaise affecting him earlier had washed away. A few minutes of stretching later, he felt absolutely great. Ready to take on the world.
The clothes he had been wearing were thrown in a pile by his closet. Like everything else, he had no memory of taking them off. Jon did an inventory. Jeans, T-shirt, underwear, socks. Sneaker- singular. Sneaker? Where was the other one? Damn it. He franticly began digging through the mess that was his room. In the closet, under the bed, by the dresser, around the desk. Nothing. He had to find it.
Not that he even liked them. They were just another reminder how his parents cheapened his life. All his pals, even broke-ass Louis, had Nikes. And what did Jon’s affluent parents bequeath him? KangaROOS, a knock-off Australian brand in ugly grey with pink trim. Their only distinguishing feature was a little pocket and zipper on the side. The pocket might sound pretty cool, but it was too small to hold anything thicker than a dime. Essentially it was just a useless zipper to spice up the look of a poorly stitched shoe.
Still, there would be hell to pay if it was lost. He could feel his mother’s tongue lashing against his back already, yelling at him for hours. Maybe buying him an even worse pair if that was possible. He scoured the living room, the last place he remembered being, but there was nothing. All of the puke had been expertly scrubbed out of the carpet and couch. Maybe they’d found the sneaker and tossed it somewhere.
The rest of the downstairs also yielded nothing, so he hit the upper floors. Perhaps Catherine had taken it. That would explain her laughter earlier. He kicked open her door. Decorated in the style of a fantasy princess, her room was full of pink and white, silk and lace. The bed was the most comfortable around. The TV was prominently displayed with a horde of plush animals surrounding it. Every Barbie accessory a little girl could want was crammed in there. Every top-of-the-line ballerina accouterment, batons for twirling, and makeup as well as jewelry for when they hit the child pageant circuit. Everything was beautiful and spotless. He hated it. And as far his rooting could tell, there was no sneaker.
Michelle’s room, actually a converted attic space, was locked up tight. The only way in was a ladder that extended from a pull-down rope. Jon had never seen up there. He’d only smelled dubious odors wafting down.
That left his parents’ room. A place he feared to tread. He creaked the door open, half-afraid some booby trap would swing out and decapitate him. It was pleasantly arranged. Nothing audacious. The decor was almost muted. Catherine’s room was far more extravagant. It wasn’t until he opened drawers and closets that the decadence shined. Designer clothes, racks of fashionable shoes, expensive scents, tasteful jewelry, a drawer full of Rolexes. The St. Fonds did not practice self-denial.
He was digging through Father’s shoe trees, filled with Testoni Italian leather shoes, when he heard a click. His elbow had hit a concealed button along the line of the wall, invisible to the naked eye. The back of the closet dislodged from its base and retracted a quarter of an inch. He pushed and the back slid to the left. There was a small alcove with an electric hum.
Inside was filled with monitors, each displaying a different room. There must have been a hidden camera hook-up riddling the house. As he looked closer, there were multiple views of every room, each from a different angle. No stone was left unturned. No blind spots were obvious. His room was there. Catherine’s as well. The attic, the bathrooms (ugh), the master bedroom, the kitchen, the basement. Two even displayed the back and front yards. These all connected up to a high shelf, full of VCRs recording every movement. Jon had never suspected anything like this.
A padded fold-out chair was in the corner, next to a Waterford glass and bottle of—he picked it up—Glenlivet Nadurra. The label identified it as an eighteen-year-old single malt. Jon didn’t know much about liquor, the smell nauseated him, but made the educated guess it was expensive.
He flipped the chair open and plopped down, holding the bottle by the neck, taking in the enormity of the find. This room wasn’t supposed to be here. He knew the architectural specs, the original ones from the 1920s he had come across in his research, and every square inch was accounted for. All of the rooms were roughly of the same dimension as originally designed. Or were they?
He moved his hands across the walls. Solid yellow pine on both sides. The nails and studs seemed to be aged the same as well, but the shelves holding the VCRs and monitors were made of plywood, and were screwed in, not nailed. The screw heads were shinier, obviously having been added at a later date. Logic dictated that this little room had been a detail added to the original blueprints at the orders of his great-great-grandfather, who went through workmen like toilet paper. How many other little rooms were there?
He unscrewed the whiskey and took a snort, then suppressed a blob of vomit. How could people drink that shit? He’d take a slug of Mountain Dew over that piss any day of the week. He had an emergency stash of the soda in the back of his own closet, which of course his parents knew.
So they had been watching him his whole life. Every cry, every panic attack, every imaginary conversation, every masturbatory incident, everything. It must be how they knew about Louis. They wouldn’t have had to read his journal. They probably knew about Kathy too. Course he didn’t remember ever dialing Louis from his house, but his memory wasn’t perfect. Maybe he should rewind the tape. How far back did they go? He popped one out. It was a specialty job, very expensive, and contained enough tape to last twenty-four hours. He returned it to the machine and pressed record.
He looked closer at the screen, was the definition good enough to pick up phone calls? Each of the monitors had a joystick that allowed the camera angle to be adjusted, a little button on top zoomed the image in. He pushed it in on the rotary phone at his little desk—another way they screwed him, everyone else had a touchpad phone extension. Yeah, the picture was clear enough.