by J M Fraser
But a far more disturbing element had burst onto the scene recently, providing plenty of fodder for additional therapy sessions. Her forest dreams now included a macabre opening act on a subway platform where a man shoved her in front of a train at her request, or she twisted away and leapt on her own. What did it matter?
“You fell onto the tracks again.”
Carla nodded.
“And into the next dream.”
“The good one.”
“Your home away from home.”
The continuing kindness in Elaine’s smile eased Carla into the cushions again. “I fell into Sanctimonia.”
“To watch for barbarians?”
“One can’t be too careful.”
“Or too virtuous. That’s what Sanctimonia means in Latin, isn’t it?”
They’d covered this ground already—more subconscious teasing, this time her brain assigning a happy name to her happy place. She shifted in her chair. These sessions were becoming redundant.
“So once again, your suicide dream—”
“Contrived death.”
“Your dream about contrived death acted as a passageway to this other world of yours.”
“Sanctimonia can’t only be mine. These dreams seem far too real.”
“A contrived death and then this other world of ours.”
Carla had to admit the woman had a gift for understated humor.
“Did I just notice the hint of a smile?”
“You coddle me like a child, Elaine.” The tea had a pleasant aroma, despite a loose leaf or two. She gave in and brought the cup to her lips, and the lemony taste pulled her back to the man’s kitchen. “I’ll tell you what happened, but I don’t want to hear a word about me being crazy.”
“You know I’d never say such a thing.”
“I was swept out of Sanctimonia to a different place.”
Elaine’s fascinated expression was priceless. They hadn’t had a new insane fantasy to discuss since the subway nightmares began.
“One minute I was in the forest and the next in my own neighborhood. Except I wandered down a street I didn’t recognize. The day turned to night. Then a thunderstorm blew through and melted me into the pavement.”
“Go on.”
“A man invited me into his house.”
“Sounds risky.”
“Not really. He had kindness in his eyes. Besides, I knew I was dreaming.” Or had she been? Doubts loomed large in the light of day. She moved her fingers to her temples.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She groped to recapture her train of thought. Train…bad choice of words. She closed her hands around her cup to stop another tremble. “We sat in his kitchen and enjoyed each other’s company.”
“You liked him.”
“I wished I didn’t have to leave.”
“Where did you need to go?”
“Anywhere but there.” Carla glanced at the lucky couple on the pier. She’d been physically and emotionally attracted to a man who didn’t exist. “He was only a figment.”
“A dream.”
“So why do I have this?” The tremor in her hand intensified. She fumbled in her purse and found the business card Brewster had given her.
Elaine examined the card with pursed lips, flipping it from side to side before handing it back. “You dreamed about someone you’d already met.”
“No, you aren’t following. Brewster is a complete stranger. He gave his card to me during the dream and I awakened with it in my hand!”
Elaine glanced across the room at her PC still resting on the chair. No doubt she was dying to log into an online thesaurus and find the kindest synonym for crazy.
“I looked for him this morning,” Carla pressed, “but I couldn’t find the right street.”
“Let’s think about this.”
She’d thought about it far too much already. “My mother would claim something supernatural happened, but you’re thinking I’m nuts.”
“I’m not leaning that way.”
“You’re just stroking me again.”
Elaine fixed her with her signature expression of reassurance—a pleasant, crinkle-eyed smile. “I’m sure there might be a dozen sane explanations for what happened, but let’s just explore one, okay?”
“Whatever.”
“You don’t think you ever met this man before?”
She shook her head.
“Do you collect customers’ business cards in your shop?”
“I’m not following.”
“Many storekeepers keep little boxes or bowls at the counter where a customer might drop a card in the hope of winning a drawing. Do you have anything like that?”
Ah, the magic of what if. Elaine’s bag of tricks was bottomless! Carla did collect business cards, and she sometimes brought the bowl home. Perhaps one of the cards spilled into the clutter of her apartment until it found its way to her bed, along with the lingerie, toiletries, books, and other random articles she had to clear away when carving out some sleeping space each night. She might have registered the man’s name in her mind before casting the card aside. Then she dreamed about him and later awakened with his card still in the bed, near her hand.
Elaine continued boring that soothing gaze into her soul. “Feeling less crazy?”
No. The last time the fishbowl had come home with her was a month ago when she blasted a bunch of emails out for her Labor Day sale. Why would a random name stick in her head that long? But any more conversation about an imaginary man whose card was somehow real would drive her straight to the recliner, where she’d talk crazier and crazier until doctors in white jackets came to drag her away. “Relieved is the better word.” She tried to fake a smile.
CHAPTER 10
Brewster’s Chicago office, the morning after Carla’s visit
Brewster gave up on the paperwork littering his desk and studied a floral print on the wall. Would anyone else examining the picture perceive the identical image? Perhaps his blue flowers were everyone else’s purple. He took the notion further and considered whether his viewpoint was so unique nobody’s sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell was the same as his.
The next step brought him to the end of the path, a scary question teetering over the edge of a bottomless pit. The only perception he could be sure of was his own, and even that had been proven unreliable. Suppose everything and everyone were figments of his imagination in a fantasy world suddenly flipped upside down? He stared into the abyss and watched with his mind’s eye as Carla vanished from his porch again.
He scrabbled back to the reassuring reality of his workplace, a relatively reliable environment where midnight visitors didn’t disappear into thin air. Only money did.
Brewster grabbed a loan application from his in basket and tried to focus. The monthly payment was too high. He scribbled a note on the cover page, instructing one of his deal processors to reduce the interest rate.
Before the market crash, he’d kept a plaque on his desk proclaiming greed as good—a proclamation by false gods, as things turned out. He’d recently replaced this with a more practical framed cliché. Never calculate your yield before recovering your principal. A loan structured with unaffordable payments would eventually morph into a problem. In fact, the cabinets just outside his office overflowed with defaults.
He tossed the application into his out basket, noticed a day-old coffee stain on his desk, and grabbed a tissue to wipe it away. He’d recently axed the after-hours janitorial service in yet another round of budget slashing.
Crestview Finance’s losses had taken a heavy toll on what had once been a gleaming building full of carefree, prospering employees. Earlier cutbacks during the prolonged recession had already left the place with outdated phones, clunky laptops, and an Internet service often blinking out at the most inopportune times. Fading decorative plants pined for the care of a florist who no longer came at night to prune and water them. The kitchen fell short of condiments and plastic
utensils, daily delivery of the local newspaper bit the dust, 401(k) matching contributions disappeared, and health plan premiums and deductibles spiked upward.
Frantic employees had done their best to embrace cost consciousness, but their attempts to keep the mother ship from listing typically proved more annoying than effective. Brewster had to grope his way out of the john recently when somebody switched the lights off to save power, unaware of his presence in one of the stalls.
He flicked a tiny red mite from his keyboard and looked up at the probable culprit. The dying leaves of a potted palm draped over the edge of his desk. The miniscule spider must have abandoned that happy home in search of a hot spot, spurred by a poorly maintained air conditioning system locked into ice-cube mode for the day. He brushed another mite from his screen but took care not to smash the thing, knowing from past experience the red smear would look just like blood.
With loan processing and pest control out of the way, he grabbed the placeholder card for Rag Thyme from his shirt pocket—proof he hadn’t imagined Carla’s visit. Yet the card didn’t have a phone number, and he’d failed to find any reference to her shop on the Internet.
He reached for the phone to try directory assistance, but it rang before he could lift the receiver from its cradle.
“Brewster!” The front-desk receptionist had lowered her normally perky voice to a hush.
“What’s up, Ronda?”
“There’s a customer here to see you. Igor Tesfaye. He’s waiting on the couch.”
“Very funny.” The employees of Crestview Finance and their customers never set eyes on each other. The company financed over-the-road truckers looking to buy big rigs, and like many lenders in the industry, they conducted their business behind a veil of anonymity, relying on the selling truck dealers to act as intermediaries. Applications came in over the computer, Brewster’s coordinators communicated approvals and declines by email, his loan processors overnighted closing documents to dealer locations for execution, and the truckers had their monthly payments automatically pulled from their bank accounts. Collectors closed the loop by hounding customers over the phone—the one’s whose payments bounced.
Crestview never included a street address in its documents or allowed one to be published in any directory. Borrowers could grow angry for any number of reasons in the lending industry—perceived overcharges, imagined insults by phone collectors, fear over pending repossession—and angry customers sometimes became dangerous. A shooting had been reported at a Joliet consumer-finance company only a few weeks earlier.
A customer such as Igor Tesfaye shouldn’t have had a clue how to find the place without some determined, creepy stalking. He was probably mad as hell about something.
“I’m not joking,” Ronda said. “This guy is waiting for you, and he doesn’t look happy.”
“Um, okay, look. Why don’t you offer coffee and slip into the kitchen to get it? That’ll give you an excuse for getting away from him.”
“What if he doesn’t want any?”
“Then tell him you’re getting some for yourself.”
“Okay…and…?”
“Take your time fixing the coffee until the police get here.”
“Oh. My. God!”
“Don’t get all panicky, Ronda. Just walk away.”
“Fine.”
Brewster called the cops. After being assured by a dispatcher a squad car was on the way, he went looking for Heather, the chain-smoking mother of two he’d hired a year earlier. Always a sucker for the hint of corrupted innocence, he’d lost all objectivity during her job interview when he noticed the sexy tattoo on the side of her neck. A butterfly. She’d proven to be a capable office manager despite being hired for all the wrong reasons, and Brewster had finally reached the point where he could talk to her without stammering.
He found Heather in her office. “We’ve got a visitor,” he said.
She fixed him with a blank look.
“A customer!”
“Oh!” Heather left her desk and hurried past him into the bullpen, emerging from the cluster of cubicles a few moments later with a straggling line of employees in tow. Brewster joined a step behind the company’s beleaguered staff and headed out a side door to wait for the cops.
A dozen of Crestview’s finest soon stood along the side corner of the building and lit up their cigarettes, out of sight and about a hundred yards from the front entrance lobby, where Igor Tesfaye cooled his heels. Heather took a long drag, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and turned to Brewster. “Is this the guy who called you last week to complain about his loan?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t understand why he owes thirty-two thousand for a truck he supposedly bought for thirty. I asked why he signed a contract without reading it.”
She took another drag. “You’re assuming our customers can read.”
“I’m guessing his wife or girlfriend can. She probably gave him hell when he brought the contract home. Anyway, I explained that a finance charge is no different than points on a mortgage, but he didn’t grasp the concept.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“You need to think outside the box, Heather.” The time for feeling guilty over Crestview’s fees had long since passed. The company barely covered its overhead anymore, let alone turn a profit, despite its hefty fees.
Long, smoky minutes passed. Chatter and occasional laughter about sports, movies, dinners, and maniacal office intruders grew louder, probably noisy enough to alert Igor Tesfaye to their hiding place—if he truly did have a gun and wanted to take them all out. Brewster peeked around the corner of the building and motioned them to keep it down.
A few employees edged toward the door. The undusted, drooping-plant work area waiting inside still had some appeal. Those not tasked with harassing deadbeat customers for payments could sit and relax, working at three-quarters speed in the undemanding business environment—not many truckers had been buying rigs lately—or jump online and surf any interesting websites that had survived the company’s relentless, fun-blocking software.
Brewster stole another look beyond the double row of cars in the company parking lot into a street still lacking any squad car cavalry. More than likely, the cops had been reluctant to leave their lucrative speed traps up the road. He decided to call them again if they didn’t arrive by the time Heather’s second cigarette burned out.
The sound of a lawnmower wafted from the distance and hustled his wanderlust down a winding path of associations. Mowing equaled grass equaled nature, hills, countryside, distant mountains, shining seas…escape. The job wasn’t fun anymore. Maybe it never had been.
“You’ve had a dreamy look on your face all day,” Heather said.
He flinched. The distraction of a workplace emergency had served as a temporary but welcome barrier, holding an impossible memory of Carla’s vanishing act at bay. Heather’s comment created a hint of turbulence, threatening to collapse the wall, but he manned up, turned to her, and managed a noncommittal shrug.
“I don’t think it’s the job,” she added. “Things aren’t any worse than they were a year ago, right?”
“Right.”
“Crash and burn is our normal now.”
“Guess so.”
“Then what is it? Did your dog die?”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“A kid got sick?”
“I’m single, remember?”
Her eyes lit up. “Maybe you met someone!”
The wall collapsed, tumbling its bricks through his stomach. Brewster couldn’t go it alone. He needed someone who could share a similar experience and team up with him to solve the mystery of shadows. “Heather, have you ever seen a ghost?”
“No, but I saw a UFO once.”
“Yeah?” He leaned toward her.
She flicked some ashes to the ground and grinned. “Well, maybe not. After I switched from beer to wine, the hallucinations went away.”
“Very funny.”
“Are you s
aying you saw a ghost?”
He regretted having said anything. The Carla incident would have seemed surreal enough if brought up after a couple drinks at a bar. In a completely out-of-context work setting, he doubted Heather could even register the words he might speak. He pictured a bubble of language attached to his cartoon head and watched as it mixed with her smoke rings and drifted away.
A squad car barreled down the street and bailed him out before she could press him further.
* * *
The cop arriving on the scene seemed the hard-nosed, no-nonsense type capable of handling any insanely angry trucker who happened by. Brewster and Heather fell in step behind the man. He led them back into the office building with an aura of authority, but the nemesis they found inside didn’t seem much of a threat.
Igor Tesfaye rose from the lobby couch to stand no more than about five foot eight, slump-shouldered and rumpled, from his wavy, unkempt hair to a faded shirt, worn jeans, and dusty shoes. Nevertheless, he carried the sharp-eyed, pressed-lips look of a determined man. The recession had been tough on truckers. Many now stood only a fuel-price hike away from bankruptcy, an engine failure from homelessness. A two-thousand-dollar finance charge was a big deal to a guy like Tesfaye. The extra fifty bucks per month took food off his table.
The trucker opened his mouth to speak, but Brewster cut him off before he could spit out a word. “Why are you here?”
“I called, but you wouldn’t answer my questions. Last night a girl comes to my door and—”
“We don’t want you coming back.”
The trucker plowed on. “You’ll take care of me, she says.”
“What?” Heather had slipped off to the side in an apparent attempt to blend into the wallpaper, no doubt embarrassed the cops had been summoned to ward off a harmless-looking deadbeat, but this revelation drew her back into the thick of things. “Are you saying someone from this office came to your home?”
