A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  “It was nice to meet you, Talking Girl.”

  She smiles at him and he smiles back. She walks away, but his smile remains. He hauls his backpack down the corridor and hardly notices the students giggling at the sight of his wet pants. He finds an empty bathroom. He locks the door and gives his underwear and shorts a quick rinse in the sink, then does what Olillia suggested—he holds them under the hand dryer. He’s worried it’s going to overheat and the insides will start sparking. He does the same with his socks. Occasionally someone tries the door, a couple of times people call out and hammer on it, but he ignores them and every time they go away. After twenty minutes his clothes aren’t completely dry, but they’re far better than they were.

  The school bell rings. Lunchtime is over.

  Two hours to go until he gets to leave.

  Two more years until high school is over.

  How bad can it possibly get?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  They separate when they get to Goodwin, Devereux, and Barclay. Detective Vega heads to Human Resources to try to figure out who was where on the two days Erin was attacked, and Ben goes to reception to talk to Erin’s coworkers. Ben remembers it wasn’t long ago that the company was in the news after one of its staff went on a killing spree. It’s a piece of history that the firm has tried to forget, and he senses his professional presence here is unwanted, in case he’s about to open old wounds.

  “I’m so sorry about Erin,” the receptionist says, and even though he’s met her on more than a few occasions, he can’t remember her name. Sharon, or Suzan, or Shelly. She’s in her midtwenties and has shoulder-length brown hair that Erin once told him takes her an hour to straighten every morning. He knows she and Erin are friends, but it’s a coworker friendship that doesn’t extend into socializing much beyond gossip, Christmas parties, and the occasional after-work drink. “Is she going to be okay? She will be okay, right? I mean . . . she has to be. Why . . . why would this . . . I mean . . . everybody loves her, nobody would want to hurt her. Erin is one of the most beautiful people I know. Could it have been an accident?” she asks. “That’s the only thing that makes sense, right?”

  “You’ve heard about the fire at the hospital on Friday?”

  “Of course.”

  “It was a distraction,” he says, deciding to eliminate any maybes and possiblys to make it sound like fact. “Erin suffered a cardiac episode at the same time which was induced deliberately.” He hands her a printout of Mr. Baseball’s image from the hospital security camera. He watches for any sign of recognition. “This is the man that hurt her. Do you recognize him?”

  “I can barely see him,” she says. “His cap is in the way.”

  “It’s the best angle we have,” he says. “Perhaps you recognize the cap, or the clothes. It’s possible he’s been following Erin without her knowing it, or he could even work here.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s really hard to tell.”

  The idea of what he has to ask next makes him feel nauseated. “Were there any long lunch breaks she was taking? Any out-of-office working trips? Things like that?”

  “What are you getting at?” she asks, giving him a look that tells him she knows exactly what he’s getting at.

  “Look,” he says, “the last thing I want to think is that Erin might have been seeing somebody, and I believe in my heart of hearts she wasn’t, but what you need to realize is my job exposes people every day doing one thing when others think they are doing something else.”

  “She wasn’t seeing anybody.”

  “Would she have told you if she was?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe.”

  “Would you tell me if you knew?”

  “Of course. But she wasn’t, and I’m not so sure why you would think she was.”

  He doesn’t tell her his theory, but it’s possible she was seeing somebody else, and it’s possible after Ben proposed she broke off the relationship with the other man—and that other man, this man in the photograph, didn’t take the news well. Perhaps they were meeting at the parking garage. Perhaps that was where he parked his car, that often they’d see each other in the mornings, that they’d share a lift down to the ground floor, then walk side by side to the office before sharing a motel room on their lunch break. Neither her phone records nor her credit card statements suggest any kind of affair, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.

  “Take another look at the picture,” he says. “Take your time.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I really don’t recognize him.”

  “Out of everyone working here, who is Erin closest to?”

  “Cynthia,” she says. “I can take you to her.”

  Cynthia is an accountant, and he follows Suzan or Sarah to her office. He’s met Cynthia before, but he doesn’t know her well enough to remember much about her. She’s in her late thirties with makeup that looks like it was applied in a hurry and a black ponytail tipped with an array of split ends. Her desk is cluttered with papers and there are children’s drawings on the wall done in crayon of people and cats and trees. She gives him a tired-looking smile when he shows her the picture from the hospital, then gives him a tired version of the same answers the receptionist gave him.

  “Was she having any problems at work?” he asks, after he explains to her why he’s here.

  “What kind of problems?”

  “With men, in particular. Anybody paying her too much attention? Anybody hitting on her? What about the bosses? Any of them inappropriate around female colleagues?”

  “That stuff doesn’t happen here,” she says.

  “That stuff can happen anywhere,” he says. “Is it possible she was seeing somebody?”

  “You think she was seeing this guy?” she asks, and looks at the photograph again.

  “It’s something I have to consider.”

  “If she was, she didn’t tell me.”

  He makes his way through the rest of the office, asking the same questions and getting the same answers in return. No, Erin wasn’t seeing anybody. No, the office of Goodwin, Devereux, and Barclay isn’t the kind of place where female employees are given superlong hugs or told how good they look in a tight skirt. Vega’s trip to Human Resources is also a bust.

  They talk to everybody in the office. Ben becomes increasingly dejected. All he’s achieved is a sense of betrayal, not from Erin, but from himself for entertaining the idea she was seeing somebody else. They’re done here. They reach the elevators. When the doors open they have to wait for a courier carrying a package to step out. They step in and don’t make any conversation on the way down. He knows Vega is sensing his frustration. They reach the ground floor and get outside. The day hasn’t changed much since they arrived earlier. Same blue sky, same temperature, same traffic, same sense that the case isn’t going anywhere.

  Ben tosses his jacket into the backseat of the car. Vega climbs in, but he remains standing on the sidewalk staring at the courier van double-parked with the hazard lights blinking.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “If Erin was seeing somebody who worked nearby, we should canvass the entire block.”

  “That’s a lot of work,” she says.

  “I’m going to start with the courier driver.”

  “The one we passed on the elevator?”

  “Why not? He probably delivers to all these buildings. It’s worth a shot.”

  Ben walks over to the van and leans against it. The courier driver doesn’t appear thrilled to see Ben leaning against his van when he returns. He looks less thrilled when Ben shows him his badge. He has a goatee and a pierced nose and a small hoop going through his eyebrow. He’s the kind of guy who makes Ben wonder if all the packages in the back of his van have drugs in them. He’s wearing a blue shirt with the company’s logo emblazoned across the front: a van with a smiley face, and a parcel behind the wheel driving it, looking just as happy.

  “I’m wondering if you can help me,” B
en says.

  “How’s that?”

  “You deliver to many offices around here?”

  “I do.”

  “You recognize this guy?” he asks, and shows him the printout.

  The driver takes a look. “Sorry, mate, but I don’t, but I’m also not that good with faces.” He hangs on to the picture. “Maybe leave it with me and if I see anybody, I can let you know. I’m still making my way around so haven’t seen everybody there is to see.”

  “You mean you’re new at this?”

  “I’ve only been doing this two weeks,” he says. “So maybe if—”

  “Just two weeks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You replaced somebody?”

  “The other guy got fired.”

  “When?”

  “Like I said, a few weeks ago.”

  “But when exactly.”

  The driver scratches at his chin while he thinks about it. “I guess . . . it would have been two weeks ago. Maybe a bit longer . . . actually, I think it was a Saturday.”

  Saturday. The same Saturday Erin was thrown off the roof by somebody she recognized.

  “Could this guy in the photo be the guy who’s job you took over from?”

  “Could be, but I never met him. You should go and talk to my boss,” he says. “He might have a better idea.”

  “Give me his phone number,” he says. “I’ll give him a call.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Joshua isn’t sure which class he’s going to dislike the most. Back at his old school, he hated math. Right now he’d give anything to be in a math class instead of this god-awful place—woodshop. Canterbury School for the Blind doesn’t have this subject on offer, for obvious reasons. Until a guide dog can be trained to fire up a power saw, carpentry isn’t going to be a first choice for a blind person. Now that Joshua can see, woodworking is apparently something he has to do and, for a New Zealander, being able to build a fence or make a garden shed from scratch is supposed to be embedded into your DNA. He’s never swung a hammer or run his fingers over the grain and determined which angle to plane it from. He doesn’t have the experience or the imagination to look at a piece of wood and see a birdhouse. His dad had dabbled a little. He could put up shelves but not make them. He could put kitset furniture together without any leftover parts. Joshua figures he’d be lucky if he could get to that level.

  To make things worse, Scott is a gifted woodworker. Joshua figures that’s always going to be the way—some of the meanest kids are also going to be the most brilliant, either superb athletes or brilliant with their hands. While he struggles with a tape measure, figuring out the dimensions for the stool he has to start making, Scott is using a lathe to shape the legs of his. He makes it look so easy, and when he finishes he scoops up a pile of sawdust with both hands, comes over to Joshua’s table, where Joshua is still measuring things up, and blows the sawdust into his face.

  Immediately it gets into his mouth and he spits it out, but, worse, it’s in his eyes too. Scott is already laughing.

  “I can’t see,” he says, trying to brush the sawdust away.

  “Then it must feel like old times,” Scott says.

  The door has been opened for the darkness he’s known his entire life to come back. He doesn’t know what to do. When he opens his eyes they hurt, they hurt so bad, and everything is blurry. Have his eyes been damaged permanently? He should have been wearing the glasses Dr. Toni gave him.

  Scott walks away, still laughing. Joshua wipes at his eyes, which have started to tear up.

  “It’s going to be okay,” somebody says, another student, a boy he can’t see. “Stay calm and I’ll get Mrs. Thompson.”

  “I’ll stay with him,” a girl says, and it’s Olillia. He doesn’t have to be able to see her to recognize her voice—he figures it’s like a superpower. “I’m sorry about Scott,” she says. “I knew he could be a jerk, but not like this. I was wrong earlier. You should talk to a teacher about it.”

  “I can’t see,” he says, and he’s starting to shake. What if his eyes are ruined? What if they’re all scratched up and the nerves are getting shredded and the corneas sliced and . . .

  “Did I tell you why I was named Olillia?” she asks.

  Why is she asking him this now? “What?”

  “It was meant to be Olivia, but my dad has bad handwriting, and the person typing it onto my birth certificate thought the V was two Ls, or maybe the guy typing it was drunk, or maybe my dad was too—nobody really knows how it happened, they just know that it did. Olivia became Olillia, and my parents never got around to changing it, and by the time they did get around to it they decided not to. They liked the name.”

  “I like it too,” he says, keeping his eyes closed and his face scrunched up.

  “So do I. I like to think I might be the only Olillia in the world. Are you starting to feel better?”

  “No,” he says, then he realizes that’s not true. She’s been talking to him to keep him calm. “Maybe a little.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” she says, and he realizes then that she’s holding his hand.

  “Okay,” he says.

  She squeezes his hand tighter, then lets go.

  “What happened here?” someone asks, and his superpower tells him it’s Mrs. Thompson, the woodshop teacher.

  “Joshua got sawdust in his eyes,” Olillia says.

  “You need to stop rubbing them,” Mrs. Thompson says.

  “I can’t help it,” he says.

  “Did somebody do this to you, Joshua?”

  Olillia starts to answer. “It was—”

  “An accident,” Joshua says, interrupting her.

  Mrs. Thompson puts her hand on Joshua’s shoulder and leads him through the classroom. He can feel everybody staring at him. All he can see are blurry shapes and color. She leads him out into the foyer between the woodshop and the metal shop, where all the schoolbags are stored during class.

  “Tilt your head up,” Mrs. Thompson says, and he does, and she dabs away around his eyes with something wet, perhaps a cloth or a tissue. “I’m going to put in some drops, okay? Try not to struggle.”

  “Okay,” he says, and she puts a thumb on his left eyelid and puts in a couple of drops, then repeats it with the right.

  “This should flush anything out.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “There’s a lot of sawdust, Joshua. It’s in your hair, on your face, in your ears. You want to tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “You don’t know? That’s the fallback answer of every kid I’ve ever taught in this school, Joshua. How about you try to be more original and tell me what happened?”

  “I think . . . I think some flew off my workbench somehow.”

  “I heard you used to spend a lot of time listening to audiobooks. Is that right?”

  He isn’t sure where she’s going with this. “That’s right,” he says, moving his eyes around. They’re feeling better. Mrs. Thompson and her gray hair and blue eyes are coming into focus. There are three of her, but that’s an improvement from a minute ago.

  “What kind of books?”

  “Crime and horror, mostly.”

  “Okay, now look at me,” she says, and he does. She uses her thumb to open his eyes one at a time, stretching around them to look for more sawdust. “So you listen to lots of books, and telling me the sawdust came off your table somehow is the best story you can come up with?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” he says.

  “If somebody did this to you, Joshua, I can’t do anything unless you tell me.”

  “Like I said, I really don’t know how it happened.”

  “How do your eyes feel now?”

  “They feel fine,” he says, and the three of her have become one.

  “Do you want me to get the school nurse?”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he s
ays. “I guess I just panicked a little. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize, Joshua. Are you sure you don’t have anything else to tell me?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  Woodshop is the last class of the day, and when it wraps up he’s achieved little on his project but believes he’s achieved a lot in terms of accepting his fate. Mrs. Thompson asks Scott to stay behind, and Scott throws Joshua an accusing look, to which Joshua looks away. He grabs his bag and heads for the school gates, hundreds of other students doing the same thing, some on bikes, some walking, some being picked up, some being picked on, some ignoring him, some staring at him, none talking to him. His first day of school is over. His mom was going to teach him to ride a bike this evening, but he thinks before anything he needs to learn how to fight.

  He will call Uncle Ben later and ask if he can show him how.

  THIRTY

  The logo from the courier driver’s shirt is now staring down at Ben from a giant sign hanging outside the package depot. The smiley logo is a direct contrast to the man who manages the place, a guy by the name of Neil Proctor, who is the kind of guy who might know what smiles look like on TV but has never inspired them in real life. He tells them the guy he fired a few weeks back was Vincent Archer. Tells them it was a long time coming. Says he took an afternoon off work for a funeral, then came in late two days later and that was it. He had to let him go. That’s the kind of thing in Ben’s line of work that they call a trigger. The funeral, the boss tells them, was for Simon Bower. He gives them Archer’s address, and tells them that whatever they think he did, he probably didn’t do, but did something way worse instead.

  “He’s a strange son of a bitch, that one, and recently he’s gotten even stranger.”

  “In what way?”

  Proctor scratches at his beard while he thinks about it. He has the beard-but-no-mustache look Ben considers a mistake on anyone who sports it. “In every way,” Proctor says.

  “Can you be more specific?” Vega asks.