Page 5 of My Girl
gunshot wound to the temple?—
killed himself.
I shake my head. Even if I wasn’t closely connected to the late suspect, I would still think the circumstances of the crime were off. Why would a man have drugs in his system if he was going to kill his wifethenhimself? Wouldn’t the drugs have made it difficult to kill her? Wouldn’t he have drugged himself as a waytocommit suicide? Why would he use a gun too?
His wife was cheating; in the autopsy, among deep lacerations noted inside of her vaginal canal, there was also trace evidence of condom usage. But I’m proof that Michael Hall was cheating too. He fucked my mother while he was married, so why would infidelity make him kill his wife? And why didn’t the police investigate the wife’s lover? Was it more convenient for them to conclude that it was a murder-suicide and be done with it? Maybe the police are more involved than it seems.
Either way, none of it makes sense.
Or…maybe it does, and I don’t want to accept the truth that my father is nothing more than a hypocritical misogynist that killed his own wife. Maybe I don’t want to accept that the first person I might be able to relate to is objectively horrible.
I slam my laptop close, then scroll through my phone’s gallery. I open a picture of the Galloway House. The peeling, blue paint. The slumped overhang. The dull gray door. The tattered curtains in the windows. I squint as I zoom in on one of the second-story windows.
A shadow hovers behind the curtains, as if someone’s there, watching me take the picture. I’m just imagining it though; it’s probably an old coat rack or something.
Still, the house still draws me in, like the answers to my father’s death are waiting inside of those walls.
My phone rings, and I jolt. The picture vanishes from view, replaced with my mother’s name and profile picture. I deny the call, then dim the phone’s screen.
The device rattles again. I glance at the text message preview:The director says your job?—
I don’t have to read it to know what it says. My mother thinks she can get my job back. I never wanted to work at the hotel, and I reallydon’twant to work there now that I have a new goal.
The next text message preview:Please come home. You can’t?—
“Home,” I snicker as I delete her text messages. I can read through her words. Asking me to come “home” is not about helping me; it’s about her guilt. She feels bad that I was fired, and she definitely does not want me to find out the truth about my father.
I open up the picture of the Galloway House again. I imagine a male voice—my dead father’s voice—calling to me from the pixels on the screen.Come find me, Rae.
When I go inside, what will I find?
Chapter2
Rae
The next day,I find myself leaning on the exterior of the mall, staring at the Galloway House. The employee door to the side opens. A middle-aged man with freshly dyed blonde hair and light blue eyes grins at me. The mall owner, Ned. He playfully bumps his broad shoulder into mine.
“Fancy seeing you here, beautiful,” Ned teases, as if he hadn’t just gone down on me in his office. “I didn’t know you were out of the bathroom already.”
“All clean now.” I wink.
For a while, we stand in silence. Ned pulls out a vape pen, raspberry-flavored smoke wafting in the air, then offers it to me. I hold back a grimace—I hate raspberry—but I take a drag anyway, pretending to enjoy it.
The Galloway House’s front porch overhang is slumped to the side, and the surrounding desert is littered with garbage and tumbleweeds. The only people who have stepped foot inside of it in years are probably squatters or teenagers looking for ghosts.
I gesture to the house. “Have you ever been in there?”
“The Galloway House?” Ned asks. He laughs, then shakes his head. “I own it technically. With the mall land, you know?”
My eyebrows lift in faux surprise. I did, in fact, know that he owned the house. It’s exactly why I got a retail job at the mall. I wanted better access to the house, which meant I needed direct access to the mall owner himself. Older men like him are always easier to seduce.
“We were going to use it for an expansion,” he adds. “Why do you ask?”
I shrug my shoulders. Ned doesn’t need to know that my father died in that house.
“Curious, I guess,” I say. “Why haven’t you bulldozed it yet?”
“The architect got superstitious. And by the time?—”
