What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin Page A

there.”
    He turned to the blank screen on the wall of his parents’ den. State-of-the-art. Of course it was. In the eighteen years he’d lived here, the Marshall family had probably gone through twenty den TVs, switching up each time, and this one was trade-show material—a good eighty inches wide, slim as a credit card, a lustrous black pool of a screen. No doubt this piece of machinery was wonderful to watch his father’s old movies on, but there was no doubt in his mind that, if even viewed on that screen, the surveillance video could only be what it was, which was crap. Shane had seen clearer, more discernable images in his dreams. “I don’t know what good that would do.” His voice shook a little. “I mean . . . I’m not even sure whether that person in the video is a man or a woman.”
    â€œOh come on! ” Bellamy stood up and whirled around and made for the window, the air filling with the scent of her—cigarettes, combined with a perfume smell, cliché-sweet and expensive, the kind you find samples of in fashion magazines. “That was her on the video, Shane,” Bellamy said. “You know it was.”
    â€œKelly?”
    â€œNo. Beyoncé. What is wrong with you?”
    â€œIt is five seconds of a person in a hoodie,” he said. “It could just as easily be you, Bellamy.”
    â€œAre you fucking kidding me?”
    â€œ It could be anybody .” He glared at Bellamy, memories tugging athim. The walls of this room hadn’t changed since he was a kid. No matter how many times the TV in here got upgraded, the walls stayed white, the framed photos—stills from Dad’s movies, dozens of them—hung in the same positions they’d always been in . . . His gaze rested on the far left corner of the room, on the still from the movie he’d been thinking of: Defiance . There was rugged, western-style Dad, all beard scruff and blood spatter, aiming a pistol at the camera, his eyes glittering beacons in a dirty, chiseled face.
    Defiance was Dad’s one and only western. It had been shot in the mid-’70s, about an hour or two away from here in the middle of the blazing, dusty San Bernardino desert on a set so detailed, it felt like time travel.
    Shane had been to the Defiance set many times as a little boy. He’d loved it there—the gleaming prop guns, the horses, the pretty, busty extras in off-the-shoulder peasant blouses, Dad dressed like a real sheriff with a white hat and badge, Dad sneaking Shane glazed doughnuts from crafts services, winking at Shane through fake blood.
    But that one day . . . Man, it was amazing in how much detail Shane still remembered it. The grip of his mother’s cold fingers as she squeezed his hand outside Dad’s trailer, and her voice . . . the anger in it. “ You wait here, Shane. Mommy’s going to see Daddy for a few minutes. ” She’d said it like a door slamming, and even though Shane hadn’t understood why he couldn’t at least sit in the trailer, why he couldn’t play with that shiny badge while his parents talked—even then, at four or five years old, he’d known enough not to ask.
    It was the only time he could ever recall seeing his mother that angry. And to this day, he’d never found out why. “You don’t know everything about Dad,” he said to Bellamy. “None of us really know each other.”
    Her lips went tight. She turned away.
    â€œMr. Marshall,” Braddock said. “Did your wife leave home for any extended period last night?”
    Shane closed his eyes. “No,” he said, picturing her in his mind, Kelly drenched in morning light, stretching on the bed, her lovely back arching. Kelly’s eyes had been closed for hours, Shane knew. There she was, brushing the sleep out of her eyes, opening them for his lens, the sad gray eyes, that strange coldness . . .
    No. He had been wrong about