Debts you can't repay Part 2: Early retirement
About how pliable truth can be, even when there are bodies involved.
Readers discretion advised: contains references to murder, blood, suicide attempt, depression, alcohol abuse.
Missed the first instalment? Catch up here:
Between the tears, his heart beating in his ears, and the sweat dripping over his eyes, Garner could barely see. He stopped and rubbed a hand over his face. With a clearer sight, he noticed the rusty stains along the edge of the door, and some blotchy plastering on the wall next to the handle. Perhaps someone had escaped before? Garner tried to lift his other hand and felt a weight pulling down: he had been clutching Jenkins’ briefcase the whole time. Then, a slam made him jump.
‘It’s your turn, pal! Pucker up!’ screamed Maxwell in the doorway.
Garner’s mind went blank, and the arm holding the briefcase descended on the handle of its own volition. The handle was rusty and half-unhinged already, and Jenkins’ briefcase was metal, heavy-duty—he used to brag that he could have dropped it from a ten-story building and recover it intact. In two hits, the door handle fell with a clang.
‘Nice try, pal! Too late, though!’ shouted Maxwell, plunging towards Garner with the broken, bloody bottle in his hand. He dived, aiming at Garner’s belly, but Garner slammed the briefcase on Maxwell’s hand. Maxwell howled, dropping the bottle.
‘Son of a bitch! I will destroy you!’ he screamed.
Screaming, Garner swung the briefcase at Maxwell again, and caught his chin, making him fall backwards and knock his head on the floor with a loud thud. Maxwell fainted, a thin line of blood trickling down from his lips.
Garner stopped to breathe, trying to keep his heart from running out of his mouth, but more noises made his eyes dart to the basement door. Heavy, slow footsteps, loud grunts, and a hoarse call: ‘Henry!’
Chuck Maxwell was walking up the stairs.
Garner kicked the metal door one, two, three times; he kicked until the door caved in and the plaster patching on the wall crumbled to the floor. As he was pushing it open, a howl made him turn back.
Chuck Maxwell was taller than Garner, with the same patchy beard and red eyes as his brother. His eyes switched from Henry on the floor to Garner. He was holding an axe.
Just as Chuck lunged out of the door towards him, Garner bolted. He scrambled out of the house and ran without looking back, tripping on dislodged cobblestones and sinking into puddles. He ran, getting lost in the alleyways of the old industrial district, darting in and out of dirty yellow patches of light, his heart in his throat whenever he spotted a humanoid figure around the corner. When he finally reached a street brimming with night life, he slumped against the wall of a pub, buried his face in his hands, and cried until a small crowd had formed around him and someone called emergency services.
Garner went to the police about the Maxwell brothers. Amid frequent bursts of tears, he reported everything. They assured him they would investigate thoroughly. His boss invited him to take at least a week off ‘on the house’, because ‘it is good to be dedicated to work, but you must not forget to take care of yourself’. Steepling his fingers on the mahogany desk, he shook his head and called Jenkins’ disappearance an ‘unfortunate incident’. At the time, Garner was too busy fending off visions of men brandishing axes and taunting voices to grasp the implications. And his wife was worried sick because he kept waking up screaming, so he did take a week off.
A morning runner found Jenkins three days later on the riverbank. He was unmarried and had no children; his siblings published a concise obituary and held a small religious service, family-only, at a church not too far from the river. Garner had gone out for a walk, as he was getting into the habit of doing during his leave. His feet took him to Jenkins’ church. The door was ajar. Garner peeked inside. He counted about ten people sitting in the pews, then his eyes fell on the casket. It was closed. A sudden bout of nausea made him run away. The next day, the police called him in to give a statement. He repeated what he had already reported. They asked if he would be open to taking a polygraph and, despite his wife’s insistence that he refuse and lawyer up, Garner accepted. The results were inconclusive. In the end, Jenkins’ death was ruled a suicide, and the police never called on the Maxwell brothers.
Garner fell into depression. The bottle that had almost killed him became his closest companion.
A year after the incident, his wife left. Two years after the incident, his boss offered him a raise, which he accepted without remarks: his success rate had skyrocketed during those two years. His sunken eyes and morose disposition moved to compassion even the most belligerent collectees. After every job, Garner toasted with grim satisfaction to how furious Jenkins would have been to see how well Garner was doing without once having to raise his voice or threaten a lawsuit.
On the second anniversary of Jenkins’ body’s recovery, Garner woke up at dawn and walked to the riverbank, carrying a bag with a new bottle of whisky. He sat on a bench in front of the spot where Jenkins had been found and drank until the last drop. Then, he carefully placed the bottle next to the bench, hobbled to the river and dove in. He woke up hours later in the ER with tubes coming out of his nose, a throbbing headache, and the face of his ex-wife streaked with tears next to him. A dog walker had seen him fall in the river.
‘You need to go to rehab, Tim,’ she sobbed. ‘You could have died.’
Garner decided not to tell her. Once recovered, he requested an appointment with his boss.
‘I am retiring early. With full benefits.’
Howard Galvestone laughed.
‘Must have been one hell of a fall. Listen, you can take a week off on the house. Just because you’ve been working so hard. I heard you’ve been having marital issues, maybe you can take the wife on a holiday. Try not to look so much like a zombie when you come back.’
‘I am divorced. And I’m not coming back. I’m retiring early. With full benefits.’
Galvestone narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. ‘That is against company policy, and you know it.’
‘Fuck company policy. I am retiring early, or I’m going to the press with my story.’
His boss gritted his teeth, and Garner saw his neck tense like a rod.
‘There is no story.’
‘We can let the public decide that. Or you can sign this.’
Garner opened his briefcase and placed a paper on the desk. Galvestone looked at it down past his nose as if it had been a dead mouse, then glanced at Garner.
‘I could ruin you, you know.’
‘You already did. You sent me with Jenkins, remember?’
‘I wasn’t even in the office when you two left, you slippery weasel!’
Garner shook his head and sighed. ‘I know. You didn’t care enough to check.’ Then, he looked up at Galvestone, his eyes burning with so much anger that his boss recoiled from the desk. ‘Still, with or without me, you let Jenkins go. I suspect you knew full well what was going to happen. Which would make you an instigator.’
‘You, slippery weasel…’ hissed his boss, turning red.
‘Just sign it. It will save you the trouble.’
‘What if I make trouble for you, huh? How would you like that?’
‘Galvestone…’ smiled Garner. ‘If I disappear, or anything happens to me, the newspapers are getting the story tomorrow. Again, save yourself the trouble. It’s only an early retirement, after all.’
‘Fine, fine!’ Galvestone shouted, grabbing a pen and signing so hard the pen almost tore the paper. ‘Give this to HR and get the hell out of here! I never want to see your slimy face again!’
‘Thank you,’ answered Garner calmly, retrieving his paper and leaving, closing the door behind him.
He checked into rehab the following week and never touched a drop of alcohol again.
Garner was sixty-three and twelve years sober when Nathaniel Galvestone, Howard’s brother and prominent senator, died of a sudden stroke, and the skeletons, some metaphorical and some very physical, started strutting out of the closet. Tax evasion, fraud, and the crass irony of embezzling funds through a credit collection company. Those charges didn’t make the headlines, though. Every newspaper in the country titled: MURDEROUS MAXWELLS: TEN BODIES FOUND IN THE BASEMENT OF GALVESTONE’S COUSINS, or some variation of that.
It was a complete media circus. Garner was called to testify in front of a courthouse packed with spectators and press cameras. He simply repeated for the third time the statement he had given to the police all those years prior. When questioned on his early retirement, he produced proof of his alcoholism, suicide attempt, and years of therapy for PTSD. Howard Galvestone tried to rake Garner through the mud in his own testimony, but he was dealing with his own charges of fraud and concealment of multiple crimes; with senator Nathaniel dead, the general public wanted his head. As well as the heads of the two Maxwell brothers, of course.
Garner had avoided looking in their direction during his testimony. At the end, though, the prosecutor asked him to identify the man who had chased him with a broken bottle and the one who had emerged from the basement holding an axe. So, he had to look.
Chuck was staring at his shoes, but Henry returned Garner’s gaze without flinching. Then, he smirked and said: ‘How you doing, pal?’
That evening, Garner had to sleep at his sobriety accountability buddy’s place, in a room locked from the outside, to stop himself from buying a bottle of whisky.
The Maxwells were sentenced to life, and Howard Galvestone got house arrest on account of old age and bad health. Five out of ten of their victims remained unidentified, and the brothers themselves claimed to not remember how many they had killed. When asked why they had dumped Jenkins on the riverbank instead of burying him with the others, Henry shrugged and said they wanted to ‘switch things up’. Much to the dismay of the police department, the Maxwell-Galvestone case remained a landmark for the state, rehashed and researched for years in newspapers, documentaries, and true crime podcasts.
Garner always refused to speak on record about the case. Eventually, he changed his name and moved to a city in a different state. He spent the rest of his days doing woodwork, collecting clippings about the Maxwell murders, and reflecting on his life debt to Jenkins that he would never be able to repay.
Writing musings and news
I hope you enjoyed the second part of this creepy, somewhat true-crimey, story!
December will be lighter and perhaps even a bit festive, I promise.
In other news, work on the Heart Art Anthology continues, and we expect it to be out around February! Though there is still time, we are all so excited about it!
There is not much else to say. It’s cold, it’s gloomy, the Christmas markets are starting, though I still don’t feel in a celebratory mood. So much happening in the world makes it hard to retrieve that sense of joy.
However, not all is doom and gloom! I am spending a lot of time in my metaphorical cave writing, reading, and reviewing, and it feels like the best use of winter at the moment.
I thank you for your attention and hope you enjoyed this read!
See you soon,
Magnolia Fay