The 45th Parallel

by Lisa Girolami

  “Thank you for lending us your car.” Cam tipped the jar as well and then gave it back to him. “Would it be possible to keep it for another day or so?”

  Mr. Harlin studied them and gestured to Val. “Best I can figure, you’ve got a husband, and that’s why you two are here.”

  Val almost laughed, but she didn’t think the Virgin Marys would find the same comment amusing. “No, sir!”

  “We just need to keep a low profile,” Cam said. “And we hope we can spend the day here. We’d rather not be out and about.”

  Mr. Harlin crunched on a Necco wafer. “Hell, I don’t need to know what’s going on. Most of the time, I don’t want anyone to know my business either. And a lot of folk around here have busy noses.” He made a sniffing sound, and this time Val laughed.

  “Damn dogs,” he said.

  Cam stood up. “Can I get you anything?”

  “There’s coffee on the stove. Might need to be heated up a bit. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not.” Cam left the room saying, “I’ll pour us three cups.”

  “Cam, there, is a good kid,” Mr. Harlin said when they heard a cabinet door open in the kitchen. “Always keeps me in candy. Ran some errands for me when I hurt my back.” He shifted in his chair and looked like he was struggling in pain. “Don’t believe the town folk about her.” He settled down. “No one gossips about other people’s virtues.” He shook a finger in the air. “Bertrand Russell said that.”

  “Three coffees, here.” Cam came out of the kitchen and handed each one a mug.

  “Where are you from, Val?”

  “Dallas. But I used to live here.”

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Montague.”

  “Kris’s child?”

  “Yes. Did you know her?”

  “Not well, but I had a few scrapes with one of her boyfriends a long time ago.”

  “Which one?”

  “Dan something or other. What a dewdropper.”

  “Well, he didn’t last long. He drank. A lot.”

  “That’s what the fight was over. Seems he didn’t like the way I pumped his gas. Too damn slow, he said. That was back when I owned a 76 station south of town. I told him I didn’t like him driving all lit up like he was. Your mom was in the car and she looked scared. Of him or his driving, I’m not sure. Faster than I knew it, he snapped his cap and got out of the car. Took a swing at me. Being as hooched up as he was, he was like one of those weeble-wobble toys, so I ducked and came back with a fist of my own. Split his nose pretty good, and by the time he got to pinching back all that blood and screaming and cursing me, I had a crowbar from the garage in my hand. I used it to point out the direction he needed to leave.”

  “Wow.”

  “Funny thing was,” Mr. Harlin said as he popped another Necco in his mouth, “your mom looked at me as they pulled out of the station and mouthed ‘thank you.’ Never forgot that.”

  “You never told me that story, Mr. Harlin.”

  “Well, Cam, if I told you every story I have, those chocolates of yours would never get made, now would they?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Now, you know I’m not dumb.” Mr. Harlin adjusted in his chair again. “So I figure you all are in some kind of trouble. You don’t need to tell me anything. I’m just happy for the company.”

  “It’s not trouble we ever asked for.”

  Mr. Harlin seemed to recognize the difference as easily as one could identify black from white. “I understand.”

  “Well, Mr. Harlin, we have one thing we have to do today, but otherwise, we’ll hang out with you, okay?”

  “That’d be a hell of a nice thing for you to do.”

  *

  Val walked into Mack’s waiting room first. Luckily, three women and a man were sitting there. Two children played by the front counter, but Val had no idea whose they were. The man politely stood to offer Val his seat, but she waved him off.

  “I won’t be here long, but thank you.”

  Mack walked in from the garage, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. The moment he looked up, his eyes narrowed.

  Before he could say anything, Val started in on him. “I want to know what’s going on with my car. I’ve been waiting for days and days, and no one has called me. I just looked in your garage, and it looks more banged up than when I brought it in. What kind of business are you running here?” She ran her sentences together, partly because she didn’t want to give him a chance to respond but also because she was more nervous than a tin man in a lightning storm.

  “You must think you can take advantage of an out-of-towner. Or maybe it’s because I’m a woman. But just look at my car!” She turned to the man who’d offered her his seat. “You won’t believe the damage it’s received since it arrived here.” She began to walk out the door Mack had come through. “What have you done to it? Are you doing the same to these poor people as well?” By now the customers looked pretty surprised, but Mack’s face hadn’t changed. It was flushed red with contempt.

  She walked into the garage, hoping he’d follow her. She gestured to the male customer. “Which car is yours? Have you checked it to make sure he’s not scamming you, too?” She stepped through the door, raising her voice as she did. “You better stop working on my car! I’m going to call my insurance agent. He’s going to want to hear about this fraudulent business you’re running here!”

  When she was six or seven feet inside, she turned around and almost smacked into Mack’s face. He was seething, his nostrils puffed out like a dragon’s did right before releasing a firestorm.

  “What are you going to do about it?!” She yelled as loud as she could, which was easy to do because his rapid appearance had scared the hell out of her.

  Mack’s voice rolled out as a slow growl, low and menacing. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m here to find out what you’re doing with my car!”

  Glancing over Mack’s shoulder, Val could see through the window of the waiting room door that the customers had gathered around, watching them like they’d just arrived at a Las Vegas prizefight. Behind them, Val saw Cam dart by, toward Mack’s office.

  “Look, you fucked-up little bitch. I know what you and Cam did.”

  Val was well within punching distance, and every ounce of her screamed to back away from Mack’s face, but she didn’t dare lose her momentum. “Now you wait a minute! I brought my car in and trusted you. I needed help and I thought you’d be an honest mechanic!” She had to keep the charade up as long as she could, so when he tried to speak again, she rambled on. “I’m a single mother! I have three children to raise all by myself! And you want to drain my bank account to fix the car that they need to go to school in! How incorrigible is that?”

  His eyes burned through hers and he snarled back. “The police are looking for you right now. I suggest you get the hell out of here before I pound your face in.”

  “Ten more days? You’re going to keep it ten more days?”

  Cam darted behind the customers and out the front door.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I’m calling the police.”

  That was her cue to leave. She walked around him and back through the waiting-room door. The customers moved out of the way, and she headed quickly for the front door.

  “Is an honest mechanic too much to ask for?” she said, exited the waiting room, and double-timed it to the side street where Cam was waiting.

  Cam had the car started when Val jumped in.

  “Oh, we really need to get the heck out of here.”

  Cam drove across Coast Highway and took back streets to avoid the squad cars they knew would be heading toward Mack’s.

  “Did you get it?” Val said, her pulse still racing.

  She held up two tapes. “I found the recorder on top of a credenza that shares the wall with the bathroom, but it was empty, so I searched around his desk. I found a stack of tapes in a cabinet, behind some cleaning materials
. I took the two that were on top of the pile. They both say, ‘Edited tape.’ I’m not sure if one of these is the one with you on it, but I didn’t have much time.”

  Val took one from her, staring at the very old cassette. “It’s…a VHS tape.”

  “It was the only recorder in his office. It makes sense, though. Any recording device you’d buy today usually sends files to a server, even a Cloud server. Given the lady porn he’s been getting, I don’t think Mack wanted that. He must be converting and editing the tapes on his own.”

  “Shit,” Val said, waving the little black fossil. “How the heck are we going to see what’s on this?”

  Cam smiled at her mischievously.” You forget who’s harboring us.”

  *

  “Of course I got a VHS machine,” Mr. Harlin said as he let them in the door. Cam turned to Val and smiled again. He waved them in and noticed that they were carrying the metal plate and big spring but only glanced at them.

  As Mr. Harlin sat in his easy chair and Val sat on the couch, Cam knelt down and loaded one of the tapes in a dusty machine that sat under the television. A number of other cassette tapes were piled on either side, and Cam could tell they were mostly old Western movies and documentaries on the Vietnam War.

  “I need to warn you, Mr. Harlin,” Cam said as she stood up and backed over to the couch, “we think Mack’s been secretly filming women who go in to use his bathroom at the garage. I’m not sure exactly who’s on this one, but we felt it was important to stop him from doing this.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly.

  Cam pointed the remote toward the television and looked at Val with a nervous but hopeful smile. She seemed to be saying, “We’re in this together and it’s going to be okay.” But then again, maybe that’s what Val wanted to see in Cam’s expression because she so desperately needed the reassurance.

  Cam clicked the remote and the television hissed from the white noise on the screen. A few seconds later, the screen went black.

  “Uh-oh,” Cam said.

  “Let’s wait a bit. Remember, the camera’s somehow rigged to the light switch and doesn’t start until someone turns the light on.”

  They waited only a few more seconds and the image went from black to stark white, and then, as the lens auto-focused, they were looking down, through a square grid pattern to the toilet below.

  Cam pointed, saying to Mr. Harlin, “That’s the grill the camera’s hiding behind.”

  A child came into view. The little girl struggled with her pants and then climbed onto the toilet. In the inappropriateness that was playing out before them, they all looked away.

  The tape went black again as the little girl turned off the light and left. There was an obvious edit on the tape, and then a few seconds later, the light came back on and another little girl walked in. This happened several more times. At once, Val and Cam looked at each other.

  Cam’s eyes widened. “He’s not taping women…”

  Mr. Harlin smacked his hand on the side table next to him. “That goddamn bastard is filming children.”

  “Holy shit,” Val said, then quickly glanced up at the largest of the Virgin Mary pictures, silently apologizing.

  “That’s just sick.” Cam turned the VHS player off.

  Val watched her face drop. Cam looked down at the carpet, and Val wondered if she was thinking about how it would affect Donna.

  “If I were a few years younger,” Mr. Harlin said, “I’d go over there and put that man in the ground.”

  “Val,” Cam said suddenly. “We’ve got these tapes to nail that pervert Mack, but I think it’s time we told Mr. Harlin what’s been happening to you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took an hour to lay out for Mr. Harlin the series of events since Val arrived in town. They showed him the metal plate and the spring, and he examined both of them, turning them over in his hands.

  He listened, mostly, and when they had finally explained the need to stay at his house that day, he said, “You’ve stepped into a big pile of manure, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Val replied.

  “Mack’s not a person you want to mess with, I can tell you that, but I don’t see you have much choice in the matter. And the story does sound a little soft around the edges.” He leaned forward in his chair, lifting the metal plate and bouncing it up and down a little. “It might be a bit farfetched for the police to believe the catapult idea, but if anyone’s gonna come up with that contraption, it’d be Mack. He’s a mechanic and a hunter. He’s not smart enough to plan the exact time you’d be driving along the highway, though. And I doubt he could have come up with the gas-burner-on-the-stove trick.” He tapped the side of his head. “His elevator doesn’t go all the way up to the top floor.”

  “I believe that’s where Nedra comes in.”

  Mr. Harlin leaned back. “She’s the Marie Antoinette of Hemlock, all right. That woman thinks she owns this town. And maybe she does. She’s been known to bully people for what she wants. There’ve been more than a few houses and businesses the owners were forced to sell.”

  “We just can’t figure out what they’re after,” Val said.

  “If it ain’t about love, then follow the money.”

  “The only clue we have is that church’s address on the list,” Cam said as she checked her watch.

  “You wanna take my gun?” Mr. Harlin said. “I’ve got a .40 caliber heater you can borrow.”

  “No,” Cam said. “That would get us into even more trouble.”

  “Then send Mack over here and I’ll take care of that pervert.”

  Cam chuckled. “I wouldn’t cry at his funeral.” She turned to Val. “We’ve got a few hours until we have to go to the church.”

  Val nodded, but her stomach coiled up in apprehension. She had no idea what they’d discover, if anything. And as nervous as she was, they needed something more to take to the police. If they came up with nothing, they could find themselves behind bars with no ability to help themselves or solve the mystery.

  Either way, the thought of going to the church that night chilled her to the bone.

  *

  Val was more stressed out than she could remember. She shook inside like she’d just been dropped into a ten-foot snowdrift in the middle of a Siberian winter. She tried to sit still in Mr. Harlin’s car, but her legs kept jerking. She wasn’t sure what they’d find at the church, but just being out on the streets, knowing that at any moment the police could pull them over, made her paranoid. Just get us to the church, she chanted silently.

  Cam took side streets since most of them were void of streetlights. Val remembered playing as a child with some of the other neighborhood kids. They’d make up games or fight scenarios and play them out for hours on end, staying outside as late as they could. When the sun began to set, they strained to see where they were going or where their imagined enemies were lurking during their impromptu street games.

  Now she was traveling down some of these same streets, as an adult on a much different adventure, and hoping no real enemies were actually lurking about.

  Cam stopped shy of every street corner, pausing to see if any squad cars were roaming around. They saw very few cars at all, since it was after ten o’clock at night. With most of the stores shut down in Hemlock, virtually no one ventured out this late. In house after house that they passed, lights were on, and bluish images from televisions moved and shifted on the drapes in the front rooms.

  About three blocks from the church, they glanced at each other and Cam reached over to hold Val’s hand. She slowed to a stop on the corner and looked down the cross street, but they were the only ones on the road.

  “The tapes we have might not be the one that had you on it,” Cam said. “Maybe Mack didn’t tell the police about us because he wants to come after us himself. But then again, if he has the right one, he could still give it to the police.”

  “I suppose I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.” Val was certainly af
raid of being arrested for breaking and entering the garage, but she was too sickened by Mack to care much. “He’d have to edit the tape to show only me in the bathroom, which I think would make the police question why. He’s absolutely not going to show them those children. And if he only showed a clip of me, how could he prove it was after hours?”

  “You’re right. The tapes aren’t time-stamped.”

  “That’s because he never intended to use them for security reasons.”

  Cam leaned over and kissed her. In the dark of the same car, the night before came rushing back to Val, making her remember every spot where Cam had touched her. She thought of Cam straddling her and her own hand sliding down Cam’s pants, and the image made her suddenly light-headed.

  She looked at Cam, who was now concentrating on rolling through the intersection. Why shouldn’t Val believe her wholeheartedly? She’d been with her every step of the way, and they were side by side when they broke into Mack’s place. But then again, if she were still tight with Donna, Mack wouldn’t implicate Cam. She just needed one thing she could believe was entirely true, one fact she could put her complete trust in and then puzzle out the rest of the details. She’d arrived in town utterly unprepared for the strange events that had unfolded so rapidly. And Cam had come into her life right when she needed her and so perfectly that when Val realized Cam had shared a bed and a life with Donna, the luck she’d come upon suddenly seemed a little too perfect.

  Things had transpired so quickly that trying to pin down just one reliable, solid truth was like grabbing a matchstick in the middle of a tornado. It was probably appropriate that they were on their way to a church because Val now prayed she’d survive whatever swiftly approaching twister was coming her way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Cam drove past The Seeds of Light church and turned at the next corner to park. She killed the engine and the dashboard lights went dark. From where they sat they could see the front parking lot of the church. And though the lot had a couple of streetlamps shining cones of light downward, the church sat in shadow, its windows malevolent, black eyes staring back at them.