by Rod Kackley
On a cold winter day like this, the branches would be covered with snow and ice, sparkling in the sun.
There were benches. Joy liked to sit on them and just think. She watched the people. She thought about the future and all the great stories she would write.
This morning, Joy thought about making her best case for cracking the story of the century in St.Isidore. She told herself again this would be the story that would be her ticket to the Big City.
It was the story of the girls who had disappeared, the girls who had been killed, and the one man — Joy was sure it was all the work of a serial killer acting alone —who would be brought to justice.
If her editor, the fabulous Ms. Shapiro, daughter of the late, great, Harvey Shapiro, didn’t let her go after the story of the year, the story of the disappearing teenage girls of St. Isidore, Joy was ready to do some disappearing herself.
Joy caught herself shivering on the bench, her thinking place. It wasn’t the cold. It wasn’t the fear that Estelle Shapiro would reject her story idea, again. It wasn’t the idea of packing everything she owned back into her Kia Rio and driving away.
Pulling the trigger didn’t bother Joy. Worrying about what came next — that is what made her shiver from the inside out.
The alarm Joy had set on her smartphone went off. It was time. If she didn’t start walking now, Joy would be late to work, and that would be a whole other conversation she didn’t want to have.
So, even though she had no answer for the question, “What’s next?” Joy got up and started walking.
It wasn’t the alarm or the fear of being late that motivated her to move step by step closer to what could be a final confrontation.
Joy just couldn’t take the worrying anymore.
Maybe finding the answer to that question would be easier than wondering about it, she decided.
The wind picked up as she got closer to the Chronicle building. She was walking into what seemed to be gale force gusts that blew cold, wet snow and harsh, stinging ice into her face. If Joy was looking for a reason not to make it to the sit-down with Esther Shapiro, the weather was giving it to her.
Everywhere she looked people were bending into the wind, looking like half of the parentheses as the wind turned their frames. She held on to her blue wool hat just like everyone else was holding on to whatever they were wearing on their heads.
Whatever it was — hat, muffler, cap — it couldn’t offer much protection from this wind of a winter storm.
Joy didn’t believe it when she moved to St.Isidore a few years ago and discovered businesses and schools stayed opened downtown in this kind of weather. It seemed utterly barbaric to her.
Only slightly less wild was the Chronicle’s eight a.m. start time, especially when she had just left the newsroom six hours before after covering a late night city council meeting.
But just like everyone else, Joy kept moving forward.
Four
Joy’s glasses were fogged over, her eyes were watering, and her nose was running when she finally made it into the Chronicle building. But it didn’t bother her. Such was the shared misery of another winter in St.Isidore.
All she could think about now was one person, the lovely Esther Shapiro.
Esther wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t try so hard. Joy had to admit the woman who was a couple of years older than she, and several pounds lighter even though Esther was a couple of inches taller, did the best she could with what she had.
But Esther had a “horsey” face. That’s the only way Joy could describe it. Or maybe hers was more like the face of the Wicked Witch of the West. It went from the top of her too-high forehead, down in a perfect V shape, to her pointy little chin.
Her black eyes bugged out at Joy during their one-sided conversations in which Esther told Joy what she wanted, and Joy stewed before nodding her head affirmatively.
While Joy’s body could most charitably be described as “curvy,” Esther’s followed the same harsh lines of her face. She was all skin and bone, sans breasts, as far as Joy could tell.
The Chronicle would be all Esther’s as soon as her father died, and she never let any of the rank-and-file forget it. Esther was the first person at her desk every morning and the last to leave at night.
Where she went at night was the subject of non-stop office gossip. Joy was pretty sure Esther had been sleeping with at least a couple of the Chronicle’s female interns. However, neither she nor anyone else in the newsroom had the guts to investigate that story.
But with all of that said and done, Joy still wondered why the woman had to try so hard to be the “boss.”
It started again when Joy asked for what she knew would be the last time about investigating the disappearances and deaths of at least seven young women in St. Isidore.
“Go for it,” said Esther.
Joy, who had been sitting on the edge of her chair with the weight of at least an hour’s worth of arguments in her favor, nearly slide off the hardwood chair onto the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Esther said. “You told me you were ready for this, go out and do it. What’s your plan?”
Joy gathered her thoughts, took a quick sip, and then another, out of her water bottle and then began with her bullet-pointed plan.
Joy had told Esther all of this before, but evidently either she hadn’t been listening or had not cared enough to take notes. So, Joy began at the beginning.
“I want to start with the first two girls who were discovered hanging from the trees in St. Isidore Park back in the 1970s,” Joy said, “and move chronologically up to the present time.”
This time, she noticed, Esther was taking notes. And when her pen wasn’t on the yellow legal pad in front of her, Esther was actually making eye contact with Joy. She couldn't wait to tell the rest of the serfs in the newsroom about what it felt like when the Ice Princess cracked.
“We know there are at least seven girls who were discovered in the trees, and each one was reported missing by family seven to ten days before they were found. The cause of death was always the same, or at least that is what the ME’s office has always said; suicide,” Joy said.
“And you don’t think it was?”
“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. We need to find out.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Joy asked. “Because we don’t know for sure. Because we have doubts. Because St. Isidore deserves to have an answer.”
“St. Isidore has that answer,” Esther responded with a fair measure of sarcasm. “We know how they died. They were all suicides. We need to find out what drove those teenage girls into the trees and why they all hung themselves.”
Joy, fueled by the ever-present knowledge that she was certainly the smartest person in this room, rose from her chair and began to pace the hardwood floor of Esther’s office from faux brick wall to faux brick wall.
“You don’t find it the least suspicious that all of these girls killed themselves in the most unlikely way a teenage girl will decide to take her own life?”
“What is unlikely,” Esther using her fingers to do air quotes, “about hanging yourself?”
“Because they were teenage girls. Teenage girls, or women for that matter, don’t hang themselves. They do a prescription pill overdose, or maybe cut themselves deeper than they really wanted to,” Joy said. “They don’t hang themselves for the same reason they don’t shoot themselves. It’s just too violent.”
Joy closed her argument just as an attorney might finish laying out his case to a jury. She wound up in front of Esther, her hands on her boss’ desk, her face about six inches away from Esther’s nose and chin, which were sharp enough to cut meat.
“A BDSM cult.”
“What?”
“You know, bondage, domination, blah, blah, blah,” Esther said. “What if they were involved with some kind of a weird BDSM cult.”
What if you were in a sort of a weird BDSM cult? Joy thought. That was one of the rumors.
>
Joy paused, wondering how to respond when suddenly her eyes were opened.
Now, Joy understood why Esther's mind had been changed.
Circulation numbers had been down. Newspapers around the world were losing readers to the internet. Publishers like the Shapiro family were being forced to trade print dollars for internet dimes.
Well, so be it. If the Chronicle needed a spark, Joy thought, I will give them a spark. I will fire up the circulation numbers like they have never seen before. That has to be the best way to get to the Big City. I will just say, “Look what I did for the Chronicle. I can do it for you too.”
“Could have been. Maybe it was. Teenage girls kidnapped by BDSM cult in St. Isidore. Why not? We will go back to the beginning,” Joy said. “We will begin with the first two girls who were found in the trees back in the 1970s.”
“Why not just start with the most recent?”
“I need all the evidence.”
“Why not just write the story in a simple inverted pyramid,” Esther said. “Start with the most recent. Begin with a nice anecdotal paragraph put the background into a nut graph and wrap it up with a graph about the police continuing to investigate, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it was a BDSM cult, blah, blah, blah.”
Joy let that idea hand in the air like the over-ripened, low-hanging, rotten fruit that it was.
“If it was a BDSM cult,” Joy said and almost choked as she stopped herself from snickering, “so be it. But I don’t think so. I believe this was the work of one person, maybe two, both men, and both well-respected members of this community.”
“Serial killers?”
“Yeah, serial killers,” Joy said. Her thick black eyebrows worked overtime, as they danced up and down her forehead.
“They could be sitting right next to us at the St. Isidore Grill, or on the bus, or in the park. They could even be inside St. Isidore High School.”
Esther froze. Joy realized her boss had dug herself a hole and she couldn’t climb out.
The only way Esther could reject Joy’s plan would be to backtrack on everything she had previously said about wanting to give St. Isidore the answers it deserved.
“A serial killer, one maybe two,” Joy repeated if only because she refused to relinquish her advantage in this conversation.
Esther closed her eyes. She was confident Joy didn’t know how close to the financial edge the St. Isidore Chronicle had come in the last fiscal quarter. But Esther had seen the abyss. Her father was keeping the paper alive with Esther’s hard-earned inheritance.
If the Chronicle’s current performance continued, Esther was afraid she’d wind up living like, well, like Joy.
Esther blinked.
“And I am going to find them,” Joy said with a triumphant fist slamming Esther’s desk.
“We are going to find them.”
Esther blinked again.
Five
Janice never imagined she would wind up at a Mexican restaurant run by a guy named Fred. Her dreams in college had evaporated into a daily fight against flying grease, customers who ranged from condescending to snotty to raging, and all the time she was surrounded by slovenly, brain-damaged for one reason or another, co-workers.
Fred was the worst. Fred who didn’t have a Mexican bone in his body. Fred ran Fred’s Little Mexican House.
And Fred was a fucking perv!
Janice did have a lot of hate for one so young. She hated Fred, the people she worked with, the customers, the people she heard from the radio, her mother, her father, her cheating ex-boyfriend, and herself.
Janice hated everything that was a part of her sad, 26-year long life.
And as if Fred and his Little Mexican House weren’t bad enough, she had to work another part-time job at St. Isidore's only bookstore, The Reading Room where she was surrounded by more idiots. Of course, Janice had to spend another six hours wearing another stupid uniform to pay her bills. She tried to put a little away for whatever bleak future lay ahead. But it was never much.
"The Reading Room! Books. I hate books, coffee and the people who drink it," Janice said to her mirror in the morning. "God, I don't want to go to work, today."
She hated everyone. But most of all, Janice hated being herself.
Maybe that is why the internet and the personality she had created there was such a relief. When she was online Janice could be anyone she wanted to be. She could be “Mistress Jane.”
And that is who she was.
Better than the chance to be someone new, someone who didn't even bother to find St. Isidore on a map was the money.
What a scam! Janice thought to herself every time one of her loser customers gave up a credit card number. She sent them a pair of panties or a couple of pictures she had stolen from one porn site or another and bingo!
She charged $500 for three photos, $200 for the panties, which were not always hers, and $100 an hour for chat conversations.
She was pulling down an easy $2,000 a week. And, Janice did it the right way. She got an accountant, and a lawyer, and formed her own LLC corporation.
Janice was paying taxes and everything. Janice was a business woman with a future.
She had only tapped into this gold mine a few months ago, and had yet to build up enough of a bankroll to walk away from the Reading Room and Fred’s, but that was the plan.
Even if she had done if for free, which is how Janice started, she would keep doing it. Those few hours a night were the only time that Janice was an actual, totally, happy person. Best of all, she was a person making money off the people she hated.
Those were the good times. Those were the times when Janice felt on top of the world.
But there were bad times too. Every roller coaster that goes up, has to go down, right?
Janice was not happy now. She couldn’t imagine getting online with any of them now, even Tim, her best customer. She knew would be salivating at his laptop right now, just waiting for her to start chatting. It did kind of make Janice smile to realize that she was wanted to so much, even if it was Mistress Jane who was actually desired.
In the back of her mind, Janice seemed to remember telling Tim she would meet with him, soon.
That's right, Janice had thought when the last light switch was flipped, and she locked the door from the outside at Fred's. She had even drafted an email telling Tim she could hardly wait to see him.
Thank God I never sent that, Janice thought. She laughed imagining what Tim would think if he saw that message.
However, Janice's happiness didn't last
Her feet were throbbing worse than her varicose-veined legs as she walked across the dark parking lot behind Fred’s. Her beat-up car waiting to disappoint her — yes, she hated her car too — seemed to move a few feet away every time Janice thought she was taking one step closer to it.
She was ready to just sit down and cry.
The only thing that kept her going was fear.
Simple.
Dark.
Fear.
Fear had become the controlling factor in Janice’s life. She was afraid to drive in the rain. She was afraid to drive in the snow. She worried on a hot, sunny day that her air conditioning would crap out, so Janice was afraid to drive then too.
And, yeah, the online business she had started made her feel dirty. It was as much not part of her plan as working at Fred's.
At least she was putting some money in the bank.
Still, Janice would love to have a chance to start over. She wanted to scrap everything, make a right turn instead of a left turn, or, however, she got on this crappy path, and just have one giant do-over.
On her worst days, death seemed a viable alternative.
Janice thought about it when she woke up in the morning when she went to bed at night. She was thinking about it when she walked through the parking lot behind Fred’s at one o’clock in the morning.
Suicide was an option.
But that scared her too.
What was on th
e other side?
She wasn’t sure.
So she didn’t do it.
That was the only reason.
Her fear wouldn’t even let her die.
Damn it.
Well, at least there would be a long line of losers with credit cards ready, waiting for her when she got home and opened her laptop.
Six
Tim was trembling. He had come to the moment that he had been dreaming about ever since he and Janice had begun chatting online.
They had exchanged fantasies for a couple of months. It had started out as a simple customer-online hooker kind of relationship, but Tim felt it had evolved.
And based on her email, Tim knew this was finally the night it was going to happen with Janice, all of it.
And, look. She had even left her car’s back door on the passenger side unlocked.
Big back seats in these Olds 88s, he thought to himself. Must be an ’94 or maybe even older.
Tim had spent some time trying to figure out how to get inside. The driver's side door didn't work. Neither did the one on for the passenger. He'd finally gotten into the car through the back.
Crouched on the back floorboards, Tim was sweating, trying to control his breathing. It wasn't because of the effort to get into Janice's car; it was the excitement that had Tim panting like a high school biology teacher in heat, which of course is exactly what he was.
Janice got into the car a little bit easier. She turned the key in the door, pushed the button on the handle and lifted up and out to get into her car.
“You rotten motherfucker,” Janice cursed her car every night, but especially tonight when the fear had built up to a crescendo of raging terror in her mind.
Everywhere she looked — ahead, back over her shoulder, to the left, to the right — it seemed like there was a danger.
The rusty hinges on the Olds 88 door shrieked as she lifted up and out increasing the Janice Terror Index — on a scale of 1 to 10 — to a least a 7.5 if not a full 8.
