by R M Wild
“That’s insane.”
“Two, you have a closet full of brooms. I’ve never known anyone with so many brooms.”
“They all belonged to Phyllis. Besides, why were you going through my closet?”
“Three, you live in New England. We’re only a few hours from Salem.”
“By what? Highway, or broom?”
“Four, you’ve set two people on fire just by looking at them.”
“You were there for the second one. It could have been you.”
“Five, you’re a woman. Boys can’t be witches. That narrows it down by like fifty percent.”
“Tell that to the men they hanged in Salem.”
Mettle put both hands up in innocence. “Hey, if the pointy hat fits, what can I say?”
“You might think these accusations are funny, but the same kind of bullying has killed innocent people. There’s no reason it couldn’t happen again. Heck, given all the conspiracy theories on social media, I fully expect another round of witch trials. First cyberbullying and then pitchforks.”
Mettle shrugged. “People want scape-cows.”
“You mean scapegoats?”
“Same thing, but smaller nipples. It’s a lot easier to blame your problems on magic than faulty genes.”
“You know what the Salem witch trials were all about, Matt? Land. It was all a land grab. Arthur Miller got it right. And I’m willing to bet that’s exactly what’s going on here. Whoever is fomenting this cyber-steria wants me out of my house—just like he wanted Peter out of the Gold Bug Tavern and Phyllis Martin before me.”
“But what about Dimitri? Why kill him?”
“He was a loose end. He knew something about Chrissy.”
“You think Chrissy is tied up in all this?”
I leaned the broom against the wall. “She’s tied up. That’s for sure. How securely, I don’t know.”
Mettle sat up. “Listen, Casket. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let you get your hopes up. In missing persons cases, once the victim is gone for forty-eight hours, the chance of finding them alive drops to nothing. In Chrissy’s case, she’s been gone for like fifteen years. She’s already been declared legally dead. Maybe it’s time to move on.”
I shook my head. “I know, but my subconscious won’t let her go. She haunts me.”
Mettle was staring out the dark windows.
“You’re not listening, are you?”
“I’m listening.”
“My foster father mourned her and then moved on. He was her biological father. But he wasn’t there that night. I ran away instead of looking for her. I could have done so much more.”
Mettle leaned toward the windows. He put up a finger. “Shhh.”
“What?”
He kept watching the window. Then he turned back to me. “It’s nothing. I thought I saw something. What were you saying?”
“Nothing important,” I said quietly. I shifted the conversation back to him. “Do you really think the warden’s dirty?”
“I have no idea. But you saw how concerned his wife was when I brought up the size of the house. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s making a few extra bucks on the side, maybe a little axle grease from the private companies.”
A hard knock on the door made me jump backward. I stumbled over the hearth and caught myself before falling into the fireplace.
“I knew I saw something,” Mettle said. He jumped off the couch and ran over and yanked open the door.
“Who’s there?”
There was no one on the porch.
Mettle stuck his head out the door. Then he looked down. Sitting on the doormat, was an envelope.
He picked it up. “Midnight delivery.”
He went to tear it open, but I said, “Wait!”
“What?”
“What if that’s anthrax or something? Maybe a letter bomb?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. He shook the envelope. “There’s a hard shape inside.”
Before I could protest further, he tore it open and dumped the contents onto his palm.
“What on earth is that?”
25
Mettle held the tiny object up between his thumb and forefinger as if he were holding a miniature vial of poison.
“It’s a thumb drive,” he announced. He glanced out the front door again. “I bet one of the warden’s minions dropped it off. How come I didn’t hear any cars?”
The woods swallowed up sounds like a tangle of hungry vipers. “The bend in the road is strange like that.”
“Do you have a computer we can plug this into?”
“No.”
Mettle rubbed his entire head. “No computers? How do you keep the books around here?”
“I keep track of all my expenses on my phone. After all, this is the post-computer era. Haven’t you heard? Welcome to the future, Matt Mettle.”
“Bah. Marketing nonsense. Try searching a fingerprint database on your phone. I’d destroy my eyes and need to get glasses.”
“What’s wrong with glasses?”
“Nothing. I mean, they’re cute. On some people. Not me. I’d look like a diesel nerd.”
That was one of the dumbest things he’d ever said. “Let’s use the laptop in your cruiser.”
“No way, I can’t log in. I mean, I can, but I’m not gonna take that risk. Those hacker nerds in IT will know I’m in the system. I’m suspended, remember? They’re always watching.”
We stared at the tiny device. As amazing as it was that Moore’s law had held true over all these years and data storage had shrunk smaller than a lady bug, Murphy’s law was bound to rear its ugly head with something that small. The thumb drive was so tiny that a single sneeze could send it out to the harbor. Or one of us might inhale too hard and choke on it. Was it possible that this entire case came down to a piece of metal and plastic no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of a policeman?
“How about Fitzgerald?” I said.
“Who?”
“First thing in the morning, we’ll head over to the library. We can plug the thumb drive into one of their computers.”
“Oh, Fitzgerald. You mean that stupid librarian. I don’t want that long-haired freak watching over our shoulders as we conduct an investigation. He’s bound to leak our secrets to the whole community.”
“We don’t have to use his computer,” I said. “There’s a whole internet section open to the public. When was the last time you’ve been to a public library?”
Mettle looked at me blankly.
“Sorry, I retract that question.” If the library didn’t have a pull-up bar and a protein shake cafe, Mettle wasn’t interested.
“Fine, but here’s a more pressing question,” Mettle said. “If we’re going to the library first thing in the morning, then what are the sleeping arrangements tonight?”
Despite Mettle’s protests about a sore back, I made him sleep on the couch again. I brought him a blanket and a pillow, but couldn’t do anything about the length of his legs.
“Keep them bent,” I said.
“Easy for you to say.”
“Why?
“I don’t know. C’mon. Gimme a break. This is a bed and breakfast. There are other rooms upstairs. Other beds.”
“I haven’t changed the bedsheets yet.”
“So?”
“So, I presume you don’t want to roll around in the dead skin and curly hairs left by my previous guests.”
“Uggh,” he muttered and took the pillow.
The truth was, I felt way more comfortable knowing an early morning trip to the bathroom wouldn’t result in an accidental pantsless encounter. The truth was, Matt Mettle was the kind of guy who slept in mesh shorts—and only mesh shorts—and there wouldn’t be enough fabric in twenty tents to conceal his excitement.
The truth was, I was sufficiently deprived of human touch that a groggy, vulnerable encounter in the dead of the night might lead to making the beast with two backs—and as much as the h
ippie in me told my nether regions that there was nothing wrong with having a bit of fun every now and then, the pragmatist in me knew that getting freaky would complicate our situation so irreversibly that we’d put the entire case in jeopardy.
Besides, we needed a lookout. If we were both upstairs, someone who could leave an envelope on our porch without being heard could easily slip through the backdoor and poison my chocolate.
I said goodnight and took the thumb drive upstairs with me and placed it on the antique vanity across from my bed. The night was dark and with no competition from the moon, the pink light from the lighthouse blasted through the porthole window, the muntin putting the thumb drive directly in its crosshairs.
I crawled into bed and pulled the comforter up to my chin. But the presence of that device on the other side of the room emanated some kind of spirit, some kind of digital aura, that kept me awake.
I had no idea what information was on it—if anything—and for the rest of the night, it taunted me like a demonic elf on a shelf.
Before I knew it, the pink light outside had turned orange. A WHACK, WHACK, was coming from outside.
Groggy, I slid out from underneath the heavy covers, crossed the room, and looked out the window. In the backyard, Mettle was wearing nothing but a wife beater and mesh shorts. He was wielding an axe and chopping wood.
I knocked on the window and he paused and looked up at me.
“Make the pieces bigger!” I said. “They burn longer.”
“What?”
“Make the pieces bigger!”
“I’m working out, Casket. We’ll head to your place of worship when I’m done.”
Our ancestors would have been appalled to see so many perfectly good calories go to waste. I watched him for a moment, marveling at how well-crafted his body was. He must have known I was watching—after all, there was an entire forest to chop wood and he didn’t have to do it right outside my window.
When he finished, he took out his Leatherman and practiced the art of being a man by whipping the blade at one of the trees like some kind of circus knife-thrower. The funny thing about a superhero body like Mettle’s was that maintaining that look took extreme diligence, a relentless pursuit that left little time for sexier things—like reading. The inordinate number of hours needed to maintain romance-cover abs was something they rarely mentioned in the Fabio books.
I left Mettle alone to look for his knife in the leaves each time he missed the tree and went down the hall to the bathroom. There, I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and fantasized about what he would look like if he ever sat in my armchair and read a book by the fire without a shirt.
Even though Mettle was risking further disciplinary action, he insisted we take the cruiser.
“What? I can’t fit inside that little import of yours. My chest needs room to breathe.”
“I promise you my Honda is more luxurious than an eight-by-ten cell.”
“You know how often the state troopers actually come to Dark Haven? Never. At least not until you came back to town. I’m not worried about getting pulled over.”
We drove downtown and climbed the Maple Street hill to the library.
“Have you ever thought about what you might do if you had to spend time in jail?” I asked.
Mettle didn’t even have to think about it. “Lots of pushups. I’d get totally jacked. Actually, come to think of it, it wouldn’t be all that bad. The state would pay for my twaining,” he said with a horrible Austrian accent. “What about you?”
“I’d read a lot. But trust me, all the time in the world quickly becomes a burden. One day you’re working out, optimistic for the chance to improve yourself, but the next day you’re so bored all you want to do is sleep. And the day after that, you’re trying to figure out how to tie your bedsheets into a noose.”
He glanced at me. “And how would you know that?”
I thought of all those months I had spent with my head on the table in the NYCPS rubber room. “Never mind.”
We parked on the curb outside the library and went inside. Fitzgerald was in his usual spot behind the reference desk, his face green from the computer monitor and blue from the phone he was hiding below the keyboard. Basically, he was teal.
He put his phone away when he saw us approaching.
“Fewer hours at the bar?” I said.
He shrugged.
“Any word on Peter Hardgrave?”
He shook his head. Apparently, he was mute this morning.
“We were hoping to use the computers,” I said.
Fitzgerald glanced at Mettle and then back to me, his eyes becoming two little slits. “Do you need Internet access?”
“No.”
“That’ll be ten cents.”
“But we don’t need the Internet.”
“It still costs ten cents.”
“Ten cents to use the computer?” Mettle said. “Are we stuck in the 1950s? Where does all my tax money go?”
Fitzgerald looked at me as if to say, What’s with the meathead?
I shrugged as if to say, don’t ask me, and fished in my handbag for a dime. “It’s fine,” I explained. “It’s just the library’s way of placing a time limit on their machines.”
“But there’s nobody here,” Mettle whined.
“Relax,” I said and put a dime on the counter.
“Number B-2,” Fitzgerald said.
“Thank you.”
Beneath the windows in the back of the library, five computers, all beige and boxy sat atop a round table.
“Did you see the way he looked at me?” I said.
“Yeah, he probably didn’t want to go up in flames,” Mettle said. “He’d overcook the mushrooms in his pockets.”
I sat in the wood chair behind the computer labeled B-2. Its monitor looked as old as if it had been rescued from Steve Jobs’s garage.
“What if these old washing machines aren’t fast enough?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said. I plugged the thumb drive into one of the USB slots. It took the operating system a minute to locate the drive and then I opened the folder.
There were two files inside.
“These look like movie files,” I said. I opened the first one. A small window appeared. I pressed play. The playback stuttered, but the black and white footage and the angle of the camera made it pretty clear what we were looking at.
Security footage.
The movie file was an hour long. “I’m guessing this is an hour’s worth of activity at the visitation room up until the incident with Phyllis,” I said. I clicked on the other file. “This one is the same thing, except it’s the footage for Dimitri.”
Mettle leaned into the monitor. “The video the warden gave us at the station had been edited right up to the point where you entered the room. This must be the uncut version.”
I scrubbed through the video. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this. There’s nothing else going on. It’s a movie of an empty room.”
“Hold on,” Mettle said. “There’s movement behind that door.”
I leaned into the screen. He was right. Through the rectangular, wire-laced window, someone was standing behind the door on the prisoner’s side of the visitation room.
“It might be a guard,” Mettle said.
I scrubbed forward. The door opened and an inmate shuffled past the camera and disappeared into one of the booths.
“Do you recognize that inmate?”
“No,” Mettle said. “This camera is only good for the booth that you sat at. It looks like in the hour leading up to your arrival, there was one other inmate. Go back to the other video.”
I clicked on the other file and scrubbed through it. The footage was essentially the same, just a different angle of the room to capture the booth where Dimitri sat.
“Hold on, right there,” Mettle said. He leaned over my shoulder, his massive chest nudging me aside, and jabbed his finger at the screen. He was one of those people
who thought nothing of putting his fingerprints right on the glass.
“What?”
“Oh my God. Do you see that?”
“No.”
“What are you looking at?”
Mettle covered his mouth. “Right there. You can’t miss him. Look who’s behind door number one.”
26
“I don’t get it. Who am I looking at?”
“Do you need thicker glasses, Casket? Look harder,” Mettle said and stabbed the screen with his finger.
“I still don’t get it.”
Mettle grabbed the mouse from me and scrubbed through the footage again. He paused on the moment when the door on the side of the room opened to admit another inmate. This inmate was not Dimitri, but the angle had changed enough to get a decent glimpse of the guard who had escorted the inmate to the visitation room, a guard who couldn’t be seen on the videos posted online.
“I’d recognize that horrible haircut anywhere,” Mettle said.
I leaned into the screen. The guard’s head was buzzed on the front and back. His horizontal mohawk, one that went across his head from ear to ear instead of down the middle, was unmistakable.
“Roman Caesar,” we said in unison.
Out in the cruiser, Mettle took out his phone and scrolled through his contacts.
Roman Caesar was a boy we both knew in high school. His freshman year, Caesar had gone to Mainly Scissors and asked for the “caesar cut” because he had become enthralled with George Clooney on ER and wanted a hair cut that matched his last name. But Giles Fury, the hairdresser, didn’t realize that the “caesar cut” was supposed to be fashioned after Julius Caesar, not a medical operation, and he ended up delivering the strangest hair cut the world had ever seen. Thinking Caesar had asked for a “caesarian section,” Fury gave him a perpendicular mohawk that looked like the raised scar leftover from emergency surgery. Caesar had liked the notoriety from the haircut so much that he had kept his hair like that even to this day.
“Why is Roman Caesar working at the prison? I thought you arrested him for drug possession,” I said. “I thought you said he wanted to be a minister.”
