by Mark Lukens
“Yeah, maybe.”
“What is it? There’s something else?”
“Yeah. I was worried about the side effects, so I called my doctor’s office and talked to the receptionist. I called on Monday, right after I left work, after I told Steve that I needed a few days off. The receptionist told me the earliest Dr. Valentine could see me was this coming Tuesday.”
“Okay. You should probably keep that appointment.”
“When this sleepwalking started getting worse, after I filmed myself getting up and getting dressed, leaving my bedroom, I called again. I talked to the receptionist again and told her I needed an earlier appointment. She said she would talk to Dr. Valentine and get back to me.”
“Maybe you should just go in and see her.”
“I tried that today. I went to her office, but her office isn’t there anymore.”
The gleam of excitement was back in his eyes again. “What do you mean?”
“She moved her office somewhere. It’s just an empty office now. I asked the people next door to her office about it. They said she’s been gone three weeks now.”
“Three weeks?”
“The same amount of time that Michelle has been gone from her job at the nursing home.”
“Wow,” Stan whispered.
“I went behind the building, hoping to find some kind of evidence that Dr. Valentine had been there. I saw a nurse smoking a cigarette back there. I talked to him about Dr. Valentine. He said the same thing the others had, that she moved a while ago. But he also said that Dr. Valentine was never busy, hardly ever seemed to have any patients coming by. A lot of the times her office was closed.”
“So she moved,” Stan said. “Right? I mean you said you just talked to the receptionist and set up an appointment for this coming Tuesday.”
“But when I called back, the phone number was disconnected. I tried at least ten times today. I checked the internet, looking for any sign of where she could have moved to, but there’s nothing about a Dr. Valentine on the internet, only two other Dr. Valentines in Florida—one in Miami and one in Jacksonville, both men, and neither one a psychiatrist.”
“That’s some crazy shit.”
“I know.”
Stan got up from the kitchen table. “Hey, you mind if I take a picture of your meds?”
“Why?”
“I know someone. Her name’s Alicia. She’s in medical school. Working on becoming a psychiatrist or therapist or something like that. She would know about your meds, if they might cause side effects.”
“Okay. Why not?”
Stan darted down the hall to my bedroom. I followed him in there and watched as he took photos of the bottles of prescription pills on the table next to my bed. He started texting on his phone, his thumbs moving quickly.
“Sent,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
After eight o’clock I switched from sweet tea to water, wanting to be able to sleep. Again, I was tempted by the bottles of beer in the fridge, knowing a few of those would help knock me out, but I resisted the urge.
I took a long shower, hoping it would help me relax. But it didn’t. Questions still ran through my mind. Stan had said that maybe someone was setting it up to look like I’d done something to Michelle.
Could that be possible? And if so, then how did they know about my sleepwalking? Had the pills I’d been taking put me into some kind of stupor like Stan seemed to think? But if the pills had something do with all of this, then did that mean Dr. Valentine was involved with this? She’d closed her office three weeks ago—the same time that Michelle had quit the nursing home.
And then the question surfaced that I really didn’t want to ask: Was Michelle involved with this?
If Michelle was trying to frame me, then why? For the money? That didn’t make any sense to me. She’d obviously already had access to large amounts of money. Why would she need to frame me to get to it? Was there another reason she wanted to frame me for her disappearance? Did she hate me that much? And if all of this was just to frame me, then why let it go on this long? And was Michelle working with someone else? With others? And if so, then they had all they needed now. Why wouldn’t they call the cops now? Those two detectives were itching to find anything to bring me in. Maybe the mannequin would be enough.
I got out of the shower and dried off. I dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. It was still too early to go to bed.
Stan had made up his bed on the couch with some extra bedsheets and pillows Michelle had in the hallway closet. He had pulled the coffee table closer to the couch with his collection on top of it: the video camera he had brought with him, his laptop, a flashlight, his cell phone, his cigarettes and lighter, and, as promised, he had a large cup of water down on the floor at the end of the couch to wake me up if he needed to.
“Alicia called me back while you were in the shower,” Stan said. He was sitting at the corner of the couch, the pillows behind his back, his socked feet up on the coffee table, a bottle of beer in one hand.
I sat down in the recliner across from the couch, staring at him. “Who?”
“Alicia. The one I told you about—the medical student. I sent her the pictures of your meds.”
I nodded. “She say anything?”
“She said it’s pretty normal stuff for insomnia, and the stuff for anxiety and depression.”
That didn’t get us anywhere.
“I told her you were seeing a Dr. Valentine.”
“How much else did you tell her?”
“As much as she needed to know. She did a quick search while I was on the phone with her and she found out the same thing you did, that there isn’t a Dr. Valentine registered as a doctor anywhere around here. There are only two Dr. Valentines, one in Miami and one in Jacksonville.”
I nodded. I knew there was more he wanted to say—I could see it on his face. “What else did you tell her?”
“Man, the more minds we have working on this, the better.”
“What else?”
“I told her about your sleepwalking.”
Great.
“She’s definitely intrigued,” Stan said. “I told her about the office where you used to go to see this Dr. Valentine, and she found out that the address of that office is for lease now. She was able to look up the former renter.”
“Let me guess, it’s not a Dr. Valentine.”
“No,” Stan said with a smile. “It isn’t. The office was rented for the last three years by a corporation called D&C Logistics.”
I shook my head. This was getting more and more weird.
Stan sat up and set his beer down on the coffee table. He turned his laptop around on the table so that it faced me. “I looked up the company.”
“They have a website?” I was assuming it was some kind of fake name.
“Yeah, but there’s not much to it. Pretty generic stuff. A home page, an About Us page, a Contact page. Here, look.”
I got up and crouched down in front of the coffee table, staring at the laptop screen. The homepage showed a corporate office building with a cloudless blue sky behind it. Their name was at the top of the page in fancy script. I skimmed through the About Us page. There were bios of the key officers in the corporation.
“I called the phone number,” Stan said. “Disconnected. I sent an email to their contact email; it got bounced right back to me. I looked up the CEO and a few of the others, all dead ends.”
I stared at the CEO on the computer screen; the photo was a headshot of a balding man with glasses and a big smile.
“I don’t think those are real people,” Stan said. “I don’t think those are their real names. I looked up their corporation registration.”
“You can do that?”
He nodded. “They’re incorporated in Delaware, one of the easiest places to incorporate. You don’t even need to live there. Tons of shell companies are incorporated there.”
“Shell companies. You mean companies created to hide m
oney?”
Stan was getting excited. He nodded. “Launder money might be the more accurate term.”
I suddenly felt a little sick to my stomach. “You think that’s what this money is that Michelle was depositing into our account? Money that’s being laundered?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I thought about the series of numbers, wondering if they were all account numbers, imagining banks all over the world where deposits had been made. No, I couldn’t think about that. Maybe the numbers meant something else. I had been typing the numbers into an email address while sleepwalking. Was I giving someone account numbers or passwords?
Stan turned the laptop back toward him and started tapping on the keys again.
“What are you doing now?” I asked as I sat back down in the recliner.
“I’m looking up the address of the house across the street. Looking to see who owns it. Should be public record.”
I glanced over at the TV. It was on with the sound turned down low. The news was on, more reports about the domestic terrorist attack in Milwaukee. Eight people dead now from when the truck had plowed into the crowd of people. There were at least forty injured, some of them severely. I read the newsfeed crawling by on the bottom of the screen.
Stan whistled and sat back on the couch, staring at his laptop.
“What?” I asked.
“You’ll never guess who owns the house across the street.”
But I could guess. “D&C Logistics?”
He nodded. “All of this is connected somehow.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I had a tough time sleeping. It felt strange not only with the bathroom light on and the video camera on top of the dresser taping me, but also that Stan was in the living room. I wondered if he was still awake, or if he had already fallen asleep. I was having trouble sleeping, the insomnia back. I wasn’t really tired even though I hadn’t slept that much last night, it was more like I couldn’t turn my mind off. The questions and scenarios kept running through my mind.
Who was Michelle? It suddenly seemed like I didn’t even know the person I’d been married to for the last few years. Had she been living a secret life? Had all of that stuff about her parents been a lie? Was Brenda really her sister? Why would she have told Kendra that she was scared of me?
There were too many questions, too many things that didn’t seem to add up, and all I was doing was driving myself crazy trying to think about it.
An hour later, well after midnight, I finally dozed off.
The dreams came again. It started off like the other dreams. I was trying to catch up to Michelle as she hurried across the street toward the dark house. That muted golden light was coming from the front window, from around the drawn blinds.
“Michelle, wait,” I told her. “Don’t go over there.”
I knew I was running as fast as I could, yet Michelle was always ten or twelve feet in front of me even though she didn’t seem to be running that fast.
We were in the back yard, the fog everywhere. Then I was at the doorway that led into the storeroom. Michelle wasn’t inside—the room was empty. I stepped inside and looked down at my hand; I was carrying the aluminum baseball bat that I’d had with me when I had searched my house a few nights ago.
There were rustling sounds from somewhere inside the house. Someone was moving around in there, in the dark. Was it the thing in the fog? Or was it Michelle?
“Michelle,” I whispered, taking a step toward the doorway that led into the kitchen. “Michelle, answer me.”
A whisper came back to me from the darkness. It sounded like Michelle, but I couldn’t be sure. It sounded like the voice was strained, gravelly, and forced, like something was choking the person. “You have to go back home now.”
I rushed at the doorway with the baseball bat in my hands, gripping it, ready to strike, ready to hurt someone, ready to kill if I had to. “Whoever you are, you let my wife go!”
But then I stopped.
Michelle appeared in the doorway, materializing out of the darkness. She wore a beige coat and blue jeans, her arms hanging listlessly down at her sides. She had on the knee-high black boots, but it seemed as if she was floating an inch or two above the cracked linoleum floor. There was a noose tied around her throat, the rope pulled taut, disappearing up into the darkness. Michelle’s eyes were bulging, her tongue swollen, her face pale and puffy.
“No,” I whispered. Maybe I could get to her in time, get the noose off of her neck, save her before she died.
“Go home,” Michelle whispered. “There’s someone inside your home. He’s trying to hurt you. He’s trying to kill you.”
I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to help Michelle.
Michelle smiled, her swollen tongue taking up most of her mouth, her bulging eyes ready to pop out of her face. “Use the bat, Zach. Use the bat to kill him.”
*
I felt a splash of cold water on my face and then a burning on my forearm.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see Michelle standing in front of me with the noose tied tightly around her neck, the rest of the rope disappearing up toward the ceiling, disappearing into the darkness.
But Michelle wasn’t there. I wasn’t in the house across the street anymore; I was in my own house now. I looked down at my hands. I had the aluminum bat in my hands, clutching it like I was ready to swing. My right forearm was still burning; there was a charred mark on my skin.
“Zach!”
I looked to my left a little. I was in the living room. I saw Stan a few feet away. He was crouched down just a little, like he was ready to either run or defend himself as best he could. I looked back at the coffee table. It was cracked in half. Stan’s laptop was on the floor, his cell phone, his cigarettes, and a shattered beer bottle. The plastic cup with the water in it was lying on its side.
“Zach,” Stan said. “You okay?”
Stan had his cigarette lighter in his hand, holding it like a weapon.
I could feel the water dripping down my face, my hair wet, the front of my T-shirt soaked. I was dressed in jeans and sneakers.
Oh God, I had walked in my sleep again.
“Zach, you with me, man?”
I blinked the water out of my eyes and dropped the bat onto the carpeted floor. I didn’t want that thing in my hands. I didn’t want to touch it.
“Stan,” I whispered. “What happened? Did I . . .” I let my words die away.
Stan breathed out a sigh of relief. “You’re awake.”
“I was sleepwalking, wasn’t I?”
Stan didn’t answer. He seemed to be catching his breath; he looked like I did when I was having a panic attack.
“I was sleepwalking,” I said again. “Wasn’t I?” My voice was rising.
“Yeah.”
“What did I do?”
He looked at me, shaking his head a little.
“I tried to attack you, didn’t I?” My voice was now a whisper, and it seemed tough for me to get the words out. “I tried to hurt you.”
“It was . . . it was kind of difficult to get you to wake up,” Stan said.
He still seemed out-of-breath. I wondered if I had been chasing him around with the baseball bat. I looked around at my house. The lamp by the recliner was knocked over. The lights were on in the kitchen. I glanced back at the hallway, there was a light coming from the office. I felt drawn to the office, like I needed to do something in there, like I’d left some kind of business unfinished.
Stan straightened up to his full height again, exhaling a long breath; he still had the lighter clenched in his hand.
“Why was it so hard to wake me up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Stan said. He walked around the other side of the couch to get to the dining room and then the kitchen. “I tried splashing you with the water, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t think of what else to do. I’m sorry I had to burn you with the lighter. It was the only thing I could think of.”
I
followed him into the kitchen. He was grabbing a bottle of beer out of the fridge, twisting the top off. I glanced at the clock on the stove: it was almost four o’clock in the morning.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer me. He chugged a third of the beer down, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny neck as he swallowed. His hand was shaking; his whole body was trembling.
“What about work?” I asked.
“I’m not going to work,” he said, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ll call Steve in an hour. Leave a message for him.”
I figured Steve might think Stan was playing hooky to hang out with me, but I really didn’t care at that moment. Right at that moment, my life seemed to be in shambles. It was bad enough that Michelle was gone, but I knew right then that there was something wrong with me, something seriously wrong.
“I want to watch the tape,” I said.
Stan just stared at me.
“Stan, I need to.”
He nodded. He knew he couldn’t stop me.
We went into the office and Stan got everything set up for me. Like the last time, I wanted to watch the footage from my camcorder in the bedroom first, start things from the moment I woke up.
As soon as the footage was downloaded from the video camera, Stan played it for me, and then he got up to leave. “I need a cigarette,” he said.
He was pretty shaken up. What had I done to him?
I fast-forwarded the footage, not bothering to look for any lights flashing between the crack in the curtains. I watched my body twist and turn on the bed in fast motion, and then I sat up. I paused the footage and rewound it back to the moment I sat up.
Like the previous nights, I sat there for a moment in bed. I wasn’t really looking around, but my head was tilted just slightly, almost like I was listening to something. I turned the audio all the way up, but I couldn’t hear anything except for the hiss of silence. As I got out of bed the rustling of my legs against the bedsheets was loud; I turned the volume back down. I watched myself walk around the foot of my bed toward the two closets and the bathroom, walking out of the frame of the video.
