The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  “Sorry to hear that.” Davenport stared at her for a few silent moments. “Did you ever wonder why life is so full of suffering, Aloa?”

  She frowned.

  “Ever since I found Kyle at that cabin, I’ve asked myself that question, but it’s only now that I’m beginning to figure it out.”

  His words seemed to echo in her head.

  “It’s because we need suffering to bring insight and we need insight to bring transformation. Otherwise, we just go on with our soulless little lives: going to work, eating dinner in front of the TV, buying crap we don’t need in order to make ourselves feel better. But we never do feel better, do we? That’s because by trying to avoid suffering, we miss finding our true selves. I’ve suffered and so have you, Aloa. You worked hard. You denied yourself pleasure. But you pulled back before you reached transformation.” He tsked in disapproval. “Why, Aloa?”

  Outside, the wind wrinkled the water in the swimming pool. Aloa watched the ripples. They seemed to shimmer and curl like snakes.

  “We found your college records too. Eighty-nine pounds. Light as a feather, weren’t you?” Davenport’s voice was low. “A little bird who tried to fly.”

  Fly. Fly. The word echoed in her head.

  “But you didn’t fly, did you? You reached for the sky, but you let the earth pull you back. Fame, money, power. That’s what you craved and it made you mediocre. Just like the rest of the mindless people in this country. You screwed up. You made a mistake.” His gaze flickered over her. “Are you sure you’re not making a mistake now?”

  Aloa closed her eyes. Images flashed behind her lids: a dark crow, her father’s body in the forest.

  What was happening?

  “I wanted to trust you, Aloa,” Davenport said, “but these half-baked accusations you’re making? They tell me you’re still so desperate to make a name for yourself that you’re ready to hurt innocent people. Shame on you.”

  Shame. Shame.

  The room pulsed in and out as if it were breathing.

  “I see what you’re trying to do. Don’t kid yourself that anybody is going to let you back in the game, even if you think you’re some kind of justice-seeking superhero. Nobody trusts you. Nobody respects you and now you’re blowing it again with your so-called investigation. You’ll be ruined again if you keep it up. Believe me, I know.”

  The room tilted and Aloa slid from the chair to the ground, grabbing at the floor to steady herself.

  Davenport’s words floated in. “Are you all right?”

  She opened her mouth but no words came out.

  “I’ll get help” was the last thing she heard.

  Hands touching her. A car door slamming. The world speeding past in a blur.

  Shame Fame Fly Sky. The words were like a merry-go-round in her head.

  She heard a muted roar and began to walk, the sound pulling her forward to the edge of a cliff. She was high above the sea.

  She stared down into the churning blue-and-white water.

  “Come,” whispered a voice in her head.

  Her body seemed loose and unconnected, as if she might float away.

  She shrugged out of her denim jacket and pulled off her boots.

  Light as a feather.

  She reached into her pocket, felt the note tucked there, and slid it into her left boot so the breeze wouldn’t take it.

  She straightened and swayed slightly. The image of her father, long dead, floated into her memory.

  Fly, the voice said.

  She walked a few steps to the cliff’s edge.

  She felt the tug of gravity; the waves beckoning her to come.

  She inhaled a long breath, spread her arms wide, and leaned.

  The gust of wind slammed hard into the land, pushing upward along the dirt and rock, throwing a lone seagull into the air. The gull struggled, flapping its wings, but it was no match for the strong current of air and Aloa felt one of its webbed feet suddenly slash against her cheek. She threw up her arms to shield herself and stumbled backward from the cliff’s edge, landing hard on her back. The gull cried and wheeled away. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe.

  The earth tilted and rolled. Aloa dug her fingers into the ground and closed her eyes. Her body was warm, then cold. Images scrolled through her mind like some crazy movie. Birds. Eyes. A bleached skull. She called out. Or maybe she didn’t. After some time, the images died but her body still refused to move. A shaft of sunlight touched her, then disappeared. Children laughed. She pushed herself to her elbows and, finally, sat up.

  The wind pushed against her and she shivered hard, almost to her bones. She pulled her knees to her forehead and wrapped her arms around herself. Her mouth was dry and her heart pounded. Her stomach roiled. She leaned over and vomited, then huddled into a ball again.

  “Are you OK, miss?” someone said near her ear.

  She lifted her head a few inches to see a round face, brown eyes, a light mustache over full lips. She couldn’t find the words to answer his question.

  “I was your driver,” said the man. “I brought you here but you looked ill. I had another fare, but I became worried and so I came back.”

  She studied him. No memory came.

  “Are you sick? Shall I take you to the hospital?”

  She shook her head.

  The man plucked her denim jacket from the ground nearby and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Perhaps you have friends. Someone to help. I cannot leave you here.”

  A thought formed through the murk. “Tick,” she said.

  The driver frowned. “You are wanting a clock?”

  Aloa closed her eyes. Shook her head and laid her forehead back on her knees.

  “If you give me a number I will call someone,” the man said.

  He waited.

  “Please. A number,” he said, “or I must summon the authorities.”

  Aloa mumbled the first phone number that came into her head, wondering who it belonged to even as she recited it.

  The man pulled out his phone. “Ah yes,” he said after a few moments. “My name is Arjun and I have a woman here who is very much in need of assistance.”

  Aloa came awake on a purple velvet couch with the Brain Farm bending over her and what felt like a team of miniature workmen jackhammering inside her skull. The room where she lay was painted a hideous shade of lavender with prayer flags and Indian tapestries on the wall. She closed her eyes.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “In an apartment in the Castro,” Doc said. “I got a call from your buddy, Michael, saying you needed help. He was in Hong Kong so we hauled ass and picked you up.”

  She groaned.

  “What the hell were you doing, Ink?” Tick said. “You were higher than a kite.”

  The jackhammers pounded. A hazy memory formed. “I went to find the eyes,” she said.

  The men shared a glance.

  “Still high,” P-Mac said.

  “Coffee,” said Tick, straightening.

  “B12,” said Doc.

  “I’ll get her boots,” P-Mac said.

  An hour later, Aloa had downed three cups of coffee, swallowed two B12s, and was now marching laps in the alley behind the house with Doc holding her arm.

  “Seventy-six,” Tick called from his perch on the back porch as Aloa passed.

  “Can I stop now?” she asked.

  “You gotta do eighty,” said P-Mac, who’d escorted her outside and was now leaning against the wall, smoking a fat joint he’d rolled.

  “Why eighty?” Aloa asked.

  “Do not question the master, grasshopper,” P-Mac said, holding the smoke inside his lungs so his voice came out tight and low.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “Seventy-seven,” Tick called out.

  “How are you feeling?” Doc asked.

  “Better.”

  More marching.

  “That’s eighty. Get her in the apartment,” Tick said.

  Inside, Doc scrambled he
r some eggs and made her swallow a couple of ibuprofen along with a tall glass of water. Her arms and legs ached dully. The men crowded around the small wooden table watching her eat. When she was finished, Tick leaned forward. “You gotta be careful with what you buy on the street, Ink. You could have killed yourself.”

  “Yeah, you were tripping like Tim Leary when we got to you,” P-Mac said. “What was it? Acid? Molly? Shrooms?”

  Aloa searched her brain. “I don’t think I took anything.”

  “More coffee,” Doc said, getting up and pouring her a mug of something that resembled coffee but tasted more like battery acid. “Drink,” he commanded.

  Tick leaned in, folding his elbows on the table. “Tell us everything that happened after I called and you told me you hit a dead end with that drug guy. And before you ask, my kid isn’t here. We’ve got him stashed.”

  Aloa rubbed her temples, letting the memories form and details emerge from the muck in her brain. She told the Brain Farm about Wendy Pianelli’s story of the dysfunctional Davenport household and Aat Bon Tae’s tale of revenge. She described the drunk stumbling into the street, the truck hitting her, and the gray eyes she thought belonged to Kyle. She told them about going to the house and meeting with Davenport.

  Suddenly, she sat up straighter. “Holy hell,” she said. “That little bastard drugged me.”

  The men stared at her.

  “Kyle Williams. Davenport’s assistant.” Her voice rose. “Davenport told him to bring us tea. After I drank it, the room started going in and out. Like it was breathing.”

  “Color. Taste. Smell. Tell me everything,” P-Mac ordered.

  “Tiger’s-mouth root,” P-Mac pronounced after she’d described the brew’s taste, the snakelike images in the pool, her father’s voice, and the strange vertigo. “Crazy-ass stuff. Comes from this plant in northeast China. The ancients believed it allowed you to talk to spirits. It’s a helluva trip, apparently. I saw a guy on that stuff in Nam. He thought his dead lieutenant came back and told him to swim to Cambodia. They pulled him out a mile downriver, naked, half dead, and covered in leeches.”

  Tick made a tsking sound. “That’s not how I would have done it.”

  “Oh?” said P-Mac. “And how would you have killed her, Mr. Master Assassin?”

  “I would have poisoned her,” Tick said. “It’s a lot more reliable than drugging somebody and hoping they fall off a cliff. A little polonium-210, maybe some ricin on the end of an umbrella.”

  “Wait, that’s it.” Aloa leaned forward, her elbows on the table.

  “There was an umbrella?” P-Mac frowned.

  “No. The jerk wanted to make it look like suicide,” Aloa said. “Davenport had gotten my medical records and knew I’d spent time in the psych ward. I’m sure Kyle read them and figured he could slip that stuff in my tea and send me off to the cliffs knowing how disoriented I’d be. The place where I got dropped off isn’t that far from the edge. I’ll bet he followed me, and if I didn’t jump or fall, he’d have figured out a way to give me a shove.”

  Nausea tickled her throat at the thought of how close she’d come to jumping.

  “And a tox screen would just make it look like you’d gotten high before you took the big plunge,” P-Mac said. “Boom, investigation over.”

  Doc looked stricken. “So that’s what this was,” he said and pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “I found it in your boot.”

  “What’s it say?” Tick leaned in.

  Doc read the note. “This is the most honest thing I’ll do.”

  Nausea pricked again.

  “That asshat. He even wrote a suicide note,” said Tick and banged a fist on the table. “I say we give him a taste of his own medicine.”

  “No,” Aloa said.

  “Why not?” P-Mac said.

  “Because first we’re going to prove he’s the one who killed Corrine Davenport.”

  Aloa stripped off her clothes and climbed into the shower, washing the dirt and the feel of violation from her hair and skin. The bastard had slipped her a drug that stole her will and left her as vulnerable as a newborn.

  Is that how he had felt, chained in that cabin with his abuser?

  She scrubbed herself with a washcloth until her skin was pink. She stepped out of the shower and looked in the dingy mirror over the sink. She touched the red stripe on her cheek where one of the gull’s webbed feet had scratched her. What if the ancients were right? What if it was her father’s spirit she’d communicated with out on that cliff? The skin on her forearms prickled. Had her father, the bird-watcher, sent the gull to save her?

  She dressed quickly, pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans she borrowed from the apartment owner. She squeezed some toothpaste onto her index finger and scrubbed at her teeth, tugging her mind away from the sadness that came at the memory of the way her father had died: alone in the woods, his heart stopped like an old clock. She should have been there.

  She towel-dried her hair and went into the purple living room where the Brain Farm waited.

  “What’s next, boss?” Tick asked.

  Doc piloted the old VW van to a forest of newer condos and apartment buildings in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood where, according to Tick’s research, Kyle’s ex-roommate lived.

  Above the van, a wind was blowing and the sky was clearing. Doc said he’d heard on the news that the wind had come from the north, driving fifteen-foot swells that had nearly capsized a sightseeing boat off Vancouver Island and swept over Washington and Oregon. Now it was scattering the fog and drying the ground. Meteorologists were predicting the fog would be completely gone by night.

  Aloa thought of how the wind had shoved at her on the cliff and the gull had flown upward. She touched the small scrape on her cheek.

  “It’s that way,” Tick said from the back seat of the van, pointing upward toward a cluster of modern-looking buildings painted in shades of rust and cream. The condos and apartments looked over the bay and an abandoned WWII navy shipyard that was also once the site for the testing and decontamination of target ships used in the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

  Such a beautiful spot to put a place meant for war, Aloa thought as Doc pulled the van up in front of the ex-roommate’s address.

  Aloa climbed from the van and went up the short walkway. A potted palm sat on the small porch. She knocked on the door and waited.

  Anna Kim was a small woman with chin-length black hair. She wore leggings, an oversize flannel shirt, and had so many piercings in her ears and nose Aloa thought she would probably set off airport alarms as soon as she walked in the door. When Aloa said she was a journalist doing a story on the murder of Corrine Davenport for Novo, Kim let her in.

  “I’ve only got ten minutes,” she said, “then I have a conference call.”

  Kim was a freelance graphic designer who said Kyle had been the perfect roommate. She gestured toward the small bedroom off the living room where Kyle had presumably slept. “Gone all day. Slept all night. Paid his rent on time. I was bummed when he moved out. His schedule changed and he had to take care of the dude he was watching full time. He decided to live in his house instead of mine.”

  “Were you friends?” Aloa asked.

  “We got along.”

  “You remember the night Corrine Davenport died?” Aloa asked.

  “I do. Kyle was here.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Aloa asked.

  “After it happened, I remembered this,” said Kim. She walked over to a neat worktable containing a keyboard, two computer screens, a potted fern, a French word-a-day calendar, and a coffee table book on the cafés of Paris. The workstation was shoved against a picture window and abutted a green couch set behind a low coffee table. Kim tapped the keyboard and a selfie of her and Kyle in their pajamas appeared. The two of them were sitting on the couch saluting the camera with two glasses of red wine and a bowl of popcorn.

  “We were watching reruns of Wild Travels,” Kim sai
d. “We both like that show. I posted it on Instagram.”

  She tapped a few more keys and Aloa leaned into the shot to read the caption Kim had posted. “Having a wild night,” it said. “#pajamagram #tristelundi #winetime.”

  “Did the cops ask for it?” Aloa asked.

  “I showed it to them.”

  “What time was this taken?”

  “I think it was ten forty-five. Maybe eleven.”

  About the same time Corrine was being murdered.

  “Did you notice anything different about Kyle that night?”

  The woman frowned. “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing. I’m just wondering if he seemed upset or nervous that night. Maybe he needed a glass of wine after a bad day or something.”

  The woman hesitated for a few seconds before answering. “No more than usual. There was always a lot of drama in that house.”

  “What kind of drama?”

  Kim squinted at her. “What’s this about again?”

  Aloa knew she needed to tread carefully.

  “I’m looking for details. You know, to fill in blanks in the story: what the family was like, their daily routines.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Kim.

  “From what Kyle said, the wife was supersensitive and the paralyzed guy was pretty demanding. He’d get angry and the wife would run around trying to make him happy, then I guess she had an affair or something. That’s what Kyle told me, anyway. It was a pretty messed-up scene.”

  “Did Kyle ever say he was worried about getting fired?”

  She considered the question. “I don’t think so. Kyle was really good at all that caregiving stuff and was pretty attached to that paralyzed dude. He did everything for the guy.”

  “Have you seen Kyle since he moved out?”

  “He came by once, to drop off some money he owed me.” Her gaze went to the time at the top of the computer screen. “Sorry, but I’ve got to make my call.”

  Aloa climbed into the waiting van and slumped in the passenger seat.

  “Well?” P-Mac asked as Doc fired up the van with a sound somewhere between a smoker’s cough and a hog’s squeal.

  “The roommate insisted Kyle was home that night but, I don’t know, something about it seemed off,” Aloa said.