When Maxine Feels Sad

This might have been the weirdest job of Jim’s career.

After nineteen years as a surveillance investigator, there weren’t many surprises. Meet the client…talk about the particulars…set up the cameras and necessary technology…watch everything for a while…report his findings. It was tedious work. Good paychecks, but dull as tears.

This one, though. This one was a humdinger, especially since he’d done something illegal.

The assignment was to watch the Garvey house, the site of the most notorious triple homicide in Whitman County history. Hell, it might have been the juiciest piece of folklore in the whole state, for that matter. Addy and Maxine Garvey, seventeen-year-old twins, murdered their parents and little brother in there. Slit their throats with a kitchen knife while they slept, thirty years ago.

Addy was caught at the scene. The cops found her playing on the swing set in the backyard with her family’s blood still dripping from her pajamas. She made no attempt to escape. The arresting officer said she sang “Downtown” by Petula Clark in the back seat of the squad car all the way to the jail. She was currently serving a life sentence and never seemed bothered for one second by any of it. Whenever she did interviews, she was all smiles.

Maxine evaded capture, whereabouts unknown, presumed dead. The hunt to find her was intense and well publicized. It lasted for a few years, but public interest eventually waned. Once the detectives got tired of banging their heads against a wall and the news cycle moved on to the next bit of schlock, the tale of the Garvey family was quietly slipped into the back of a file cabinet forever.

Knowing the cops and media were long finished with this case, Jim thought it was ridiculous when a documentary filmmaker hired him to watch the house for two weeks. What the hell was he going to see, after all this time? The Garveys were ancient history, but he understood the idea behind the job. Now that true crime documentaries had risen to the top of the entertainment industry, it wasn’t completely shocking that some Tarantino wannabe with deep pockets wanted to score big from a forgotten creepy story. The money was right, so he took the gig. 

Privacy wasn’t a problem. The house was a few miles outside town, basically in the middle of nowhere. Ever since the killings, it had just been sitting there unoccupied. Nobody wanted to buy it, and nobody cared enough to tear it down. Sure, drunk teenagers and weirdo horror story fanatics would occasionally make the pilgrimage out there to take pictures or try to summon the spirits of the dead Garveys from the afterlife. But that was mostly in the early years after the slayings.

The filmmaker seemed like a bit of a cook. Jim had only met her in person once, along with two or three phone calls. He looked her up online, and she was legit. Three documentaries on IMDB that had respectable reviews. She didn’t give a ton of guidance or input about his surveillance. The conversations were mostly I trust your judgement stuff, which was nice because he hated being micromanaged. She had the cash. That’s all he really cared about.

Everything was finalized. Now it was just time to drive out to the place, set up the cameras, and watch air move for a while.

****

The van was more comfortable than his apartment, at this point.

After his first ten years in the business, he decided life would be easier if he just spent the money to buy one of those big vans you can live in full-time. He did some research on the internet and joined an online group of hardcore outdoorsmen, the type of guys who live off the grid. They gave him the necessary guidance for van life, and he took the plunge. His rig had a bathroom, a kitchen, a bed, and a tiny living area where he could spend all his time looking at the screens his surveillance cameras fed into.

He still kept an apartment as his official residence, but it was depressing being there. Jim was divorced with no kids and no dating life, and sitting on a couch staring at the TV made him miserable. At least he had work to occupy his mind when he was in the van.

But four days parked outside the Garvey house watching absolutely nothing was wearing on him, so he decided to violate every professional ethic in his field. Crazy with curiosity and boredom, he broke into the house and started looking around. So much for my by-the-book reputation. He had no idea what he was looking for, but the creepiness of knowing he was actually poking through the rooms where the murders happened was better than sitting around with his thumb up his ass. Plus, the filmmaker would probably drop a huge bonus on him if he found anything even remotely interesting.

The place was nothing but bare walls and floors. Obviously, an army of investigators had been through it a million times. An untrained mind would think there was no chance of any new discoveries. However, Jim was a different breed. His snooping ability was unparalleled, and he’d never met a cop who knew exactly which floorboards to pry up.

Jim knew, so that’s exactly what he did. Board after board popped up easily with a big screwdriver. Nothing but cobwebs and a few rats scurrying around underneath, but finally, he hit paydirt. Right there under a corner board in one of the bedrooms was a locked diary.

****

By the time he got back in the van, the dollar signs were practically floating in front of his eyes. If he played this right, it could be national news. Seriously, who could ever imagine a surveillance guy would find an old diary in the Garvey house after three decades?

Step one- get it open and read it. The cheap metal lock popped easily, and he sat there in the silence of his van reading all of Maxine Garvey’s dark thoughts. The more he went through this girl’s life, the less shocking the murders became. She’d been sexually abused by the family doctor from the time she was eleven. Her sister too. Mommy told them to keep their mouths shut when they went to her for help. Daddy was a drunk who hit mommy. Little Maxine said she was planning to kill them because they “made her sad.” None of this had been revealed during any of the interviews or Dateline episodes throughout the years.

Goddamn, people are gonna lose their minds when they hear about this.

Step two- call the filmmaker and tell her to get her checkbook ready.

RING…..

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hi, Jim. How’s it going out there?”

“I found something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went in the house and combed through it, and I found something everybody missed all this time.”

“Jesus Christ, Jim. You went in there? That wasn’t what we talked about.”

“I know. But I did it anyway.”

“Is that legal?”

“Nope. But once everybody hears about what I found, nobody’s gonna care how I got in there.”

“What did you find?”

“Are you ready for this? I found Maxine Garvey’s diary.”

Silence.

“What did you say?”

“Maxine’s diary. It was buried under an old floorboard. It was locked, but I pried it open and read it. I got the whole breakdown on that girl’s life. Seriously, I read stuff nobody has ever even heard. Did you know she got molested by her doctor when she was little?”

Silence.

“You read the diary?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Every damn word.”

“You weren’t supposed to read it. That makes me sad.”

Jim felt a cold zap up his spine. “What did you say?”

“I said you shouldn’t have read that diary, Jim. Don’t you know that’s somebody’s private information? Why do you think there was a lock on it? You don’t have the right to read a girl’s personal thoughts!”

“Hold on. Did you say it makes you sad?”

“Yes, it does.”  

“That’s the same thing Maxine wrote in her diary. She said that’s why she killed her parents.”

Silence.

“Wait,” he stammered. “Wait…hold on a second…”

“Did you like reading what the doctor did to me, Jim? Did you like reading how he touched me, you pervert?” That doesn’t just make me SAD! You make me MAD, Jim! You shouldn’t have done that!!”

Jim was frozen. “This can’t be true. You can’t be…”

“I can’t be who, Jim?”

“You can’t be…Maxine Garvey.”

Silence.

“Why don’t you come outside and find out, Jim? I’m right behind your van.”

Jim whipped around and looked through the rear window, where a long kitchen knife was tapping against the glass.

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