by Jeff Vrolyks
Behind The Horned Mask
Book 1
A Novel by Jeff Vrolyks
Copyright 2014 Jeff Vrolyks
Prologue
Let me begin by stating that I am not a writer—a conclusion you’d have arrived at on your own soon enough. I know no tricks of narrative nor do I have an extensive vocabulary, but I do know an editor (wink). I once lost a spelling bee trying to spell vakation. Writing isn’t my thing. Policing is. But when Norrah and I debated which of us should put this thing into words, her persistency in it being me won her the day. We haven’t put much thought into what might become of these pages, if anything, but we both agreed the events of late needed to be put on paper, and we’ll let fate or destiny take it from there. I should add that I have spoken with a couple others, and they agreed to write some things regarding this ordeal as well. To what extent I’m unsure of at this moment. So it looks like this is going to be a collective effort. I have the honor of leading off. And probably wrapping it up.
You probably don’t know me, so let me introduce myself as Jay Davis. Having been in the Marines before becoming a cop, I have long been accustomed to being called Davis, not Jay. Cops and military folks insist on calling people by their surnames, and I’d love to know why. For a while they were calling me J.D., but it didn’t stick, didn’t grow legs. Norrah calls me Jay unless she’s feeling particularly feisty or when I’ve gotten into some kind of shit.
If within the last year you’ve watched the news or listened to the radio, or have friends to chew the shit with about current events, you know who my girlfriend Norrah is. Norrah Petersen with an E, she’s Danish. She’s the one who’s given interview after interview on any number of news channels, news magazines, newspapers. I’d bet dollars to donuts that most of you have made up your minds that Norrah is a lunatic. Or insane—I’m not sure if the two are the same thing. How could someone so sane-looking and pretty be so batty? I can tell you sincerely that she is completely sane, and has never told a lie that I know of. Everything you’ve heard her say is the truth. What was alleged to have happened at her house indeed happened. I was there that day, was one of the first cops to arrive on scene. That was the day I met Norrah. It was that first week of the news-frenzy that Norrah and I began dating. Well, I say dating but it wasn’t dating. As you can imagine dating wasn’t something she was suitable to engage herself in during that time, but we were something. Come to think of it, maybe we were nothing more than new friends, but we had a kind of intuition that hinted that we had found someone more than a friend, it just needed time to blossom, and blossom it did. Did I mention that I’m not a writer? I apologize in advance for running off on various tangents during the narrative, I don’t know any better. I’m also ruthlessly apologetic. I learned that trick back when I was a teenager working some customer service gig at Sears: apologize and apologize often, it works.
I suppose I should start at the beginning and assume you have no knowledge of Norrah and the shit that happened last year. Some of the details I learned second-hand from Norrah, so keep that in mind as you’re reading personal details of her history and recent experiences, as I wasn’t a part of her life until the day that the twenty-three people went missing. Funny thing about that, the number twenty-three almost begs to have the word the before it. Without the it’s just a number; with it becomes the greatest unsolved mystery of our generation. The twenty-three who went missing.
Lake Arrowhead is a mountain town of ten-thousand or so people, located in the San Bernardino mountains in southern California. The elevation is around five-thousand feet, and it snows a few months out of the year. People unfamiliar to this region might find it hard to believe that folks shovel snow a few months out of the year right here in southern California. But it does snow, and it was snowing on that fateful February 14th, Valentine’s Day. And on top of that, it had been colder than a whore’s heart for the week leading up to it. Being a cop I see a lot more work when it’s sub-freezing, as a lot of dumbasses drive the speed limit on roads with black ice, and I inevitably wind up having to fill out paperwork because of it. Fun fact: there are ten times more fender benders up here in the winter than there are in the summer. Ten times!
Norrah’s house isn’t on the lake, but she has a great view of it. It’s a grand old three-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac, no neighbors too near, fairly remote, and it’s great if privacy is your thing. No houses behind her for a quarter mile, just untamed pines and underbrush and a steep hillside rolling away from it and eventually into the deep blue lake.
From the driveway you enter the second floor—the bottom floor can almost be termed a basement. Being that the home is on a hillside, the front of the bottom floor is underground while the back isn’t and has windows affording a view of the lake, and even has remote access. The top story is Norrah’s bedroom, a pair of guest bedrooms, and a bathroom. The second floor is a large living room with its back wall a series of large windowpanes, a deck where you can sit and sip wine while admiring the beauty of Lake Arrowhead. Norrah could suntan on that deck naked with no chance of being seen, other than by me. I keep trying to get her to do just that because she’s both pasty and looks marvelous naked. I’m sure Norrah will just love to know I wrote that.
Let me give you a brief history of how Norrah came to live in this house and why Paul was a tenant therein—Paul Klein is another name you’ve been inundated with on the news. The house was bought by Norrah’s grandparents Jack and Dolores back in the 80’s, a kind of retirement home. When her grandpa passed away ten years ago it was too much house for just her grandmother (2,600 square feet). Norrah’s parents had been living in Denver by then and had no interest in moving back to southern Cal. So when Dolores decided to move into an old-folks community, she let Norrah live there and call it her own. The house isn’t quite paid off yet, but it was bought at a time that real estate was laughably cheap, a mortgage of under a grand, so it was a sweet deal for Norrah. When Dolores dies, the house will become her granddaughter Norrah’s.
When Norrah first moved in she was working at the only grocery store in Lake Arrowhead, Stater Brothers—there’s a Jansen’s Market as well, but it’s small. She rang up groceries. She’s thirty now, so that would make her around twenty at the time. After so many years of being a checker I guess she came to the grim realization that if she didn’t get an education she’d be doing that shit for the rest of her life. Six years ago she began taking night classes at a community college down the mountain in Yucaipa, about a forty minute drive from her house. Only taking two classes at a time, it would take her nine or ten years to get that vaunted bachelor’s degree, and as I write this she is still a ways away from attaining that goal. Because she was taking classes she worked less hours, though not much less. Her expenditures were higher because of the insane prices at the gas pump, tuition and books. She lived alone in a large house, so it seemed like a good idea to find a roommate to share the expenses with. The house is ideal for such an arrangement, being that the bottom floor can be accessed without stepping foot into Norrah’s living area. It is somewhat of a basement, though I don’t know of too many basements in which there is remote access; keep in mind houses up on the mountain are on slopes, so while the bottom floor is underground at the front of the house, they are typically above ground in the back—did I mention that already? There is a hatch that can be lowered over the portal of the stairs leading down to the bottom floor, and when Paul moved in she did just that. It gave the façade of the bottom floor being an apartment, separate from the upper stories. There is a bathroom down there, but no kitchenette. Just a hot-plate and a microwave on a dresser, a little mini-fridge. The bottom floor is a studio apartment; the only door other than the ba
ckdoor is that of the bathroom. Norrah charged him four-hundred a month, just under half her mortgage payment. He had been living there for three months when the event this story is engendered from took place.
I judge Paul Klein to be about twenty or twenty-one years old (I can’t say that with any degree of certainty). When he interviewed with Norrah to take residency in her house, he had said he was going to college at the University of Redlands, or U of R. That was a lie. He also said he was working part-time at Papagayo’s, a Mexican restaurant. That was also a lie. Turns out much of what Paul said was bullshit. Paul is a big mystery in most aspects. He’s a good looking kid, the kind of smile that girls are eager to revisit, the kind of charming witticisms that make girls giggle, and exceedingly well-spoken for a kid so young. The damned thing about Paul Klein is that when detectives began investigating his history following the disappearance of the twenty-three, they found nothing. Not jack shit. It was as though he didn’t exist prior to moving into Norrah’s. And other than the registration and insurance papers on his Dodge Ram, and his Wells Fargo bank account, there are no records of his existence, not even a social security number. Being that he wasn’t a suspect of foul play against the missing people (I’ll elaborate on that later), he got by without having to prove much of his past. I don’t like Paul, disliked him from the moment I met him, and can’t put a finger on why exactly that is. Maybe it’s because his smile looks phony to me. Something doesn’t jibe with him. I’m not the only one who feels that way about him, though most don’t. Most gobble up his bullshit wholesale. Norrah didn’t feel the same way about him or she wouldn’t have let him in her house, but I suspect she was lured in by his good looks, though she won’t admit it. When I pester her about it she blushes and changes the subject, so you be the judge.
February 14th was the day it happened. By February 15th Lake Arrowhead was a town that most Americans were knowledgeable of. By February 21st a respectable percentage of the world had heard of Lake Arrowhead. The largest unsolved mystery of all time, many people say. I was patrolling highway 18 when I got the call from dispatch. Never when dispatch calls do you think this is the time that everything changes, that this call is the one that you’re going to be writing a fucking book about. I took the call indifferently, how was I to know? I was the second officer to arrive; Fred Guthrie the fat ass had just pulled up when I got there. An hour later every cop on the mountain was there. Twenty-three people gone missing under highly unusual circumstances will do that. The F.B.I. didn’t arrive till the next day, as people aren’t considered to be missing until twenty-four hours have passed, protocols being what they are. Instead of telling you what we found (or didn’t find), I’m going to recite Norrah’s story for you, a story which she’s told me time and time again. I will make no exaggerations whatsoever and will confer with her often as I write the particulars. I honestly wish she’d write this shit. But I’ve come to love her, and there is little I wouldn’t do for her. So here it goes:
Part 1:
