The note and the tiny lockbox stick out in my mind. Surely, these would have been discovered when the case was hot. Right? Beyond that, my rogue companion had the key to it. Was he closely involved with the parties in the case, or had he come across it in another way?
Also, it doesn’t escape my attention that he not only trusts me, but most likely wants to meet at some point. He probably left for home (or wherever he’s sleeping) immediately after leaving the key for me, as the sun was apt to rise not long afterward. I wonder for a moment whether he spends his time at that creepy, newspaper-laden room in the abandoned cottage. Perhaps he stays in a different one and only uses that one for his obsession. Maybe he’s even a resident of Ghost Fork.
My questions about the mysterious man’s involvement with the case turn into questions about the man himself—his identity, his purpose and intentions, and—most pertinent of all—whether he knows of me and my identity. Not knowing makes me uncomfortable, but if I can’t find relief in confidence of his benevolence, I can at least rest assured that he is not malevolent.
And again, he may not even be aware of who I am. Maybe he’s just another passenger on this mystery ride and we just happened to occupy the same car at the same time (although my doubts from before still hold strong). In whichever of these cases (or others) may be true, one consistency compels me to forge an alliance with him: that he seems to be a key component in bringing about the entirety of the truth about Willa Frye and Thad Eboncore.
The note I found rings in my head at the thought of them: I love you, Dubz. We’ll be together soon. My mind grasps for anyone else who could be called ‘Dubz,’ but I’m forced to admit to myself that my familiarity with the context is likely insufficient to make that assessment. Still, though, I resolve to be open about the possibility that it’s not Willa.
My remaining search yields nothing much of import. A few pairs of socks were abandoned and left in the side table drawers in the common area for some reason, and some squirrels have found their way into the one of the bathrooms in a unit on the next floor up. On the next floor were the therapists’ offices, and just in time; I’ve been growing bored and increasingly eager to finish here (and I don’t bore easily). But if anything can offer insight to the mental states of the involved parties, therapists’ notes and charts are the surest bet.
I reflect on my experience with a therapist, in a time that was scarcely more than a decade and a half ago but feels to me like eons ago. She was neat and polite. She wore a happy face and her office was cozy, inviting, and visually interesting.
Trinkets from all over the country—maybe even the world; my eleven-year-old brain couldn’t tell the difference either way—lined shelves and tabletops, and each had its distinct spot, as though they reserved their places with nameplates before retiring each night.
The sun sinks ever more rapidly, soon to share the western horizon with the mountains, cutting a jagged shadow into the valley. As I dig through the therapists’ files, I can only hope that I can find the correct files quickly; with dusk coming in soon, the last of my natural light will be banished to tomorrow. While I do have a flashlight (and spare batteries), such luxuries would render me nakedly visible from the outside. I didn’t worry about that quite as much last night, but two major factors have changed since then: First, that I’m several stories high, and thus visible to greater distances. Second, I’m not certain of the whereabouts of those guys from earlier. Their voices ceased some time ago, but that’s not hard confirmation that they left; only that they’re no longer talking within earshot of me. That is mildly comforting, but still not enough for me to act rashly.
With these things in mind, I fish through stacks of reports and filing cabinets with greater speed (and less thoroughness) than for which I’ve always been reputed. Beth used to watch me process crime scenes with one eye on the clock, tapping her foot and sighing on the minute every minute just to drive home how long I was taking. It blanketed the beginnings of our camaraderie with some tumult, but as soon as I started finding things that she missed, it opened doors for growth, both in regard to my career and in terms of our friendship. The foundation of our relationship was built firmly on my failure to be a misogynistic asshole, but this dynamic sparked a competitive streak that rocketed the pair of us through case after case.
God I miss Beth.
I finally close the last of the drawers in Janey Tramish’s office—the last being in her desk, containing only a handful of pens—and leave, preparing myself for the next office. But as soon as I step out onto the landing, I hear a strange grating noise on the west side of the building, followed by a loud, rhythmic series of bangs.
For a wild second, my imagination spins into overdrive, fashioning all sorts of scenarios in which vengeful specters of the past manifest and use some ancient power to close my throat and strangle me. However, my mental return to reality is rapid and I regain enough of my gall to follow the noise. It sounds like it’s coming from that combination hallway and lobby area where I first entered the building, and I realize that they’re probably those guys from earlier, trying in vain to explore the locked areas of the school. Like me, but without success.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Nonthreatening as they are to me now, I would be much happier if they turned tail and left. The doors here are indeed strong and heavy out of necessity, but I don’t know these guys or how far they’re willing to go to get inside. So I make a fast decision.
I descend the stairs as fast as I can without making much noise and slip through the doorway back into the lobby where they’re trying to enter.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
I can hear their voices more clearly now. There are indeed two guys, but whether because they were quiet before or because their voices simply didn’t quite carry to me, I hadn’t perceived the two women with them.
By the sounds of the conversation and the general way the guys sound (that is to say, like assholes), this strikes me as a cliché scenario: take the girls on a date out to the creepy abandoned place so that they get frightened into the big guys’ arms.
I suppose I can help with that.
Three more crashes come. Bang. Bang. Bang.
My turn. In between sets, I raise my knee up to my chest and kick the door with mighty force. Two of them scream, and they aren’t the women. Without a window through which to view me, they fall silent for a moment—to be sure they aren’t just imagining it, I’m sure.
One voice says, “Did that just—” before I cock and launch another kick.
“Hello? Is someone there? How did you get over there?” asks one of the girls. While her bravery (or persistent skepticism) is impressive, I’m afraid that I may have to find another way to deter them, but then the guys speak up:
“Jesus, Melissa, are you fuckin’ insane?”
“For real, let’s go! Shit’s creepy as hell.” The girl laughs, but evidently submits; I hear some hastened shuffling, and duck into the shadows, relishing in their hasty retreat as I go.
I make a mental note to check the forums later for a post about this. I feel that this particular encounter will be deliciously embellished when it makes it to the Internet.
But for now, I need to rush back up to the fourth floor and make use of what little time I have remaining before this sudden twilight turns to inky black night. I don’t necessarily need to read the pertinent information right away, but rather, I’ll be most efficient in snatching anything with Willa’s name on it and perusing it later. As I resolve to do so, I almost feel HIPAA glaring in my direction.
In Mary Crankle’s office, I finally find what I’m looking for: a simple yellow folder marked ‘Willa F.’ Even in my resolve to collect my prize and get out, I’m yet tempted to open the folder and flip through its contents. But I will myself to get going. When I reach the bottom floor again, the sun’s light has since faded entirely, and its relative warmth has dissolved quickly along with it.
A mountainous chill wraps me in its frigid finger
s before long and I can see my breath against the twilit sky, even in the limited light offered by the entryway. My opportunity for escape is fast approaching.
I run through a mental checklist, assuring myself that I left nothing behind without proper scrutiny. I will have a wide window of time to leave, but I’m getting tired and I miss my bed.
Before making a beeline to the exit, I sit in silence for a time, listening for any other adventurous souls, sure, but also immersing myself in the quiet. Yeah, it’s been this quiet the whole time, but only in terms of decibels. In regard to mental volume, this excursion rivals any concert you might imagine. Now, though, the writhing tentacles of perpetual thought finally grow weary and slow to a less daunting, more restful level, even going as far as to border on full-on repose.
And for a minute or two, I’m too lethargic to risk sending my mind into action again, and thus content myself with sitting on the bottom step until I’m ready to leave. Such a cognitive tranquility is a scarcity in my life, and I’ll be sad to see it go, but the pregnancy of my newly purloined documents and their potential impacts on this old case are enough to shake me free of my complacency.
I slip through the dark hallways, this time without a turbo-charged curiosity. Once again, I close all of the doors behind me. They’re spring-loaded so as to shut on their own, but many of the doors’ springs seem to have expired, so instead of the authoritative whoosh with which those kinds of doors normally close, they shudder rather than swing closed, and lack the shutting power to latch properly.
Once more in the school hallway, I consider exploring the cafeteria, but disregard that urge when I think about my bedroom.
In the awkward buffer between the school hallway and the main lobby, where I first entered, I’m halted by the noise of a car’s tires crunching on gravel outside. I can’t see anything from where I am, and while it’s tempting to look around through one of the windows, I also acknowledge that my own invisibility is dependent on these visual obstacles.
Such prudence turns out to reward me; after a minute, bright, sweeping headlights’ beams surge in through the windows, temporarily brightening the room. A few glass frames glint briefly before going dark again. The car’s crunching returns and the beams drift away, leaving me in a solid darkness once again. As my eyes readjust to the blackness, I listen to the car as it turns tail and heads back down the dirt and gravel outside. I wait for a few minutes longer, just in case my path is blocked by crunching footsteps or a searching flashlight beam. But no such threat arises, and at last I leave through the same door that admitted me earlier.
The air outside is familiar but oddly estranged, like returning to one’s hometown after living abroad for a long time and finding things either more worn than you remember or replaced by new buildings. I breathe it deeply and feel a sense of relief I haven’t felt for some time.
Ten
Todd
Todd parks outside of what he learned is the only apartment building in town. He first considered searching the abandoned houses he learned about, but knew Remy wouldn’t have chosen a place without water and gas—in his time of deep grief or stress, his longest-standing and most reliable form of relief is a hot shower—so hot that Todd must let the bathroom air out for a while afterward before he can stand to be in it.
In the back seat, Odin whines—he must have caught Remy’s scent.
The apartments consist of a single building, with only four apartments. Numbers one, two, and three have already had traffic since Todd parked. Guests and visitors, mostly, but number two’s tenants left and returned with groceries.
With these factors in mind, Todd watches number four with an obsessive attentiveness. He of all people is aware of Remy’s gift of subtlety. If Todd gets distracted for even a minute, he might miss him.
At first, he knocked on the door. Of course, he didn’t expect it to be answered right away, but he also knows Remy would have liked to know who it was, and if he had seen Todd through the peephole, no doubt he would have thrown the door open and lunged into his arms.
But now, he is starting to worry that Remy might be out adventuring. He likes to consider himself careful, but in certain emotions’ holds, he can be quite susceptible to impulsive decision-making, particularly when driven by justice or some kind of penance. This is a quality Todd holds dear most of the time, but in crucial moments of self-preservation, he sometimes wishes that Remy would keep that in check a little better.
At length, Todd determines that Remy must indeed be some kind of ‘away’ at the moment. So where to begin looking for him? If he’s not here, he’s either on some heroic adventure (Todd tenses at the thought) or he’s familiarizing himself with the area. To that end, Todd pulls out his phone to search for any local crime lately, with which Remy may have gotten involved. To his relief, no recent crimes show up, but among the search results, virtually every single article is about a suicide from decades ago. Todd reads the article, and two words jump out at him: “…now abandoned…” Suddenly, he has an idea of where Remy is.
The path to the school hasn’t been maintained ever since it closed, but Todd is still sure that he can navigate his car up there. It’s too early for snow, at least, so he won’t have to worry about that. In any case, it can’t much hurt to try. So he sets off after committing to memory a rough map of the area. The road is indeed rough, but after a particularly bumpy patch, it smooths out.
Just as Todd picks up speed, however, movement in his headlights incites a small panic and he arrests his momentum up the steep hill. Four people, two men and two women, it looks like, are running down the hill at a dead sprint, seemingly either unaware of or unyielding to the rocky and uneven terrain on which they tread. Todd can’t quite see well enough to be sure, but it sounds like one of them is in the middle of a hysterical fit of sobs.
If Todd were one to perceive such events as signs from the universe or a higher power, he might turn back, but as he is not that type, he continues up the hill. Sure, logic might indicate that that group was running from something, but it’s most likely either an animal or a paranormal encounter, based on what Todd was able to find out about the town.
In the case of the former, he has the protection of his car, and in the case of the latter, it was most likely that they frightened themselves into terror by attributing natural phenomena to supernatural culprits. Todd is satisfied in his safety and presses onward.
Though he keeps a distinct barrier between his rational thoughts and those rooted in emotion, Todd notices that he can’t help but let his imaginative speculation circle around the highly improbable what-ifs, even going so far as to consider ghostly apparitions, such as those that dominated any lore or history he tried to find regarding the town. He pauses briefly when he comes to an overlook, and rolls his window down to hear the mighty roar of the waterfall, previously inaudible over the hum of his engine and the crunching progression of his tires over the unpaved road.
The mist from the waterfall dampens things this high up, however, and as Todd curves up and around the drop-off, he enjoys the smooth quiet. He eases his way upward and comes to the bridge which, according to his recollection of the map of this route, lies immediately ahead of the school. He finds this to be the case as he finishes the curve, and his headlights’ beams cut through a chain-link fence to illuminate the entrance to the school. There’s a gate which, if opened, would easily admit his car, but it’s locked with a shiny padlock, glinting and taunting Todd before his eyes.
Just like at the apartment, Odin perks up and whines.
He considers scaling the fence for a moment—without barbed or razor wire, it poses little challenge—but then where would that leave him? He’s confident that Remy is inside, but Remy has the advantage of years of experience trespassing and picking locks. The two champions of Todd’s mind, his love and his ration, battle for the reins of his being. On one hand, he’s closer to Remy than he’s been in over a month, but on the other hand, his subject is entirely inaccessible. S
urely there are locks upon locks upon locks inside, especially if his own experience in treatment is anything to go by. Remy has probably figured something out, though; he always does.
He resolves to catch him at his apartment, like he originally intended. He swings his car around and heads back down the damp pathway, the last bits of his emotional draw to the school diminishing with less rapidity than Todd would like.
The drive back into town is devoid of panic-stricken twenty-somethings and feels just slightly bumpier than the uphill counterpart. He crosses the unofficial barrier back into the inhabited districts of town, aiming for Remy’s place once again. He parks in the same space he occupied before, and sees a figure emerge from behind the building, beyond where Todd is able to discern any real shapes. The backdrop is just a line of trees, and the twisting, sinuous shadows and silhouettes make it more difficult to discern shapes or objects.
Todd’s heart begins to race—the figure, a man, is the same height as Remy and has the same general build. He zips to Remy’s apartment—with all of the grace and agility Todd has seen in Remy. But he doesn’t pull out a key and unlock the door. He only lifts the mat and leaves something underneath.
Odin cocks his head out of curiosity. Todd’s hand hovers above the door handle as he watches—he was fully committed to opening the door and initiating the reunion for which he’s been longing for so long now. But his heart won’t allow it now, as that isn’t Remy. Just a similarly built, similarly moving imposter. But that is Remy’s apartment, so who is this guy and what are his intentions?
Whoever it is, Todd is inclined to think that his presence here isn’t one that Remy brought about. Remy, Todd thinks, is most likely still reeling from the resulting effects of his imprudence in Wometzia. He’s not about to go making friends (or, hopefully, enemies) just after getting all settled and anonymous.
Thunder Falls Page 10
