by Blake Pierce
“It’s okay,” Avery said. “How many people are here with you right now?”
“Just three others. Two first-shift waitresses and my manager.”
“Could you please gather them up for me and meet me at the bar area? I have a few really quick questions I need to ask about a woman that we think might have been here early last night.”
“Sure thing,” the hostess said. She took off toward the back of the restaurant quickly, excited to be in the center of what could potentially be some juicy drama and gossip.
Avery and Kellaway entered the bar area, freshly cleaned from the night before. Yet it still held the smell of spilled beer and stale over-sprayed cologne. A sign over the bar boasted that the place offered the best Mudslides in the country—apparently where the name of the place came from.
The hostess and the other three employees all arrived together. Avery could spot the manager right away; he was the upright-looking thirty-something leading the pack. There was worry and panic on his face whereas the expressions of the others—two women in their twenties and a male who looked fresh out of high school—were ones of excitement and curiosity.
“Are you the manager?” Avery asked the thirty-something leading the little pack. The name tag on his shirt read DAN.
“I am. What’s this about?”
Avery showed him her badge and then pulled out her phone. “We’re trying to determine if a certain woman was in here last night. Her name is Abby Costello and we have a fairly solid lead that makes us think she would have been here. Were any of you here last night after six in the evening?”
The hostess and the young-looking guy both raised their hands. “I was here until closing,” the hostess said. Avery saw that her nametag read BRITTANY.
“I clocked out at ten,” the young man said. His nametag read DEMARIUS.
Avery pulled up a picture of Abby that she had found on Facebook. The photo had been uploaded just three days ago, so it was very recent. “I know you see a lot of people in here every day,” Avery said. “But if you could really try to remember this woman, I’d appreciate it.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Brittany said. “Yeah, I saw her. She was really nice. Very chatty.”
“And was she on a date? Was there a man with her?”
“I think so,” Brittany said. “I served them at the bar. The guy was sort of all over the place. He sat next to her but not for the whole time.”
“And do you know what time this might have been?” Kellaway asked.
“Well, I remember them so well because it was pretty early—before it gets really busy for the dinner and drinking rush. I’d guess they were here around five thirty or so.”
Avery then looked to Dan, the manager. “If I give you a debit card number, could you look through the evening’s transactions to find out when it was used?”
“Yeah, I can do that.”
“Kellaway, can you pull the card number from the files and set him to it?”
Kellaway nodded right away, thumbing through her phone with expert proficiency. She and Dan headed over to the register behind the bar.
“Brittany, this is very important…do you think you could identify the man she was with? Can you describe him?”
“He was tall. Maybe right at six feet…maybe a little over. Dark hair, good-looking in an unshaven sort of way. He was very intense, just the way he talked to people, you know? He was flirty with me when I served him but not in a gross way.”
“And how did the woman seem to you? In a good mood? Something bothering her?”
“She seemed uptight at first, when the guy was with her. I caught her rolling her eyes a lot, like wishing he’d go away. That kind of thing.”
“You said when the guy was with her. Was he not here with her the entire time?”
“No. I missed what happened but the guy left after a while. When he was gone, I saw the woman looking around nervously. I’m pretty sure she asked the woman beside her if she could use her phone at some point. I remember that because I thought it was weird that she didn’t have a phone. Everyone has a phone, you know?”
“Did anyone else come in to meet her after her date left?”
“No. Not that I saw. I’m sorry…that’s when it started to pick up. I barely remember her paying her check. I felt sort of sorry for her. I got the feeling that her date bailed on her.”
“Do you know how long she was here after her date left?”
“No idea. Maybe half an hour.”
From behind the bar, Kellaway called out. “Got it. Abby Costello paid her tab at six thirty-two yesterday afternoon. Two drinks, one shot, and a burger.”
Avery considered the time for a moment and then added: “Brittany, do you remember Abby and this man maybe having harsh words at the bar?”
“No. Like I said, though…it was clear that she was annoyed about something.”
Avery nodded, her head putting the scenario together. So maybe they had an argument and the guy left…but then abducted her afterwards. Or, if Abby wasn’t into serious relationships like Amy claims, maybe she met up with someone after the guy left. Maybe her date here last night is not the killer. But if it is…we at least need to check it somehow.
She opened her mouth to start asking about the date that had left Abby, but her phone rang before she got the chance. She nearly ignored it but then thought it might be the coroner with some other interesting finding from Abby’s autopsy.
When she saw that the number was one she didn’t recognize, she nearly ignored it. But it was at that moment where something more than gut instinct kicked in. She’d experienced it maybe three times in her career, the urge to act one way or another based on nothing more than sheer feeling. It was almost supernatural in the way it washed through her. She knew she needed to answer the phone.
So she did.
“One moment,” she said to the gathered Mudslide Grill employees. She turned her back to them and answered the call. “Avery Black,” she said.
“Mrs. Black…this is Janell Mitchell calling with Boston Rescue and Emergency Services. I’m calling because I just got a call from one of our ambulance drivers stating that they are on the way to the hospital with your daughter.”
Avery felt the world freeze all around her. Her mind seemed to refuse to accept the words she had just heard. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You said my daughter?”
“Yes ma’am. Rose Black. She should be coming into the ER within the next five to seven minutes.”
“I don’t understand…what the hell happened?”
“We don’t have full details yet, ma’am. But the driver and the medical attending to her seem to believe that it was a suicide attempt.”
“A…what?”
The woman on the other end responded, repeating suicide attempt again, but Avery barely heard her. She was already running to the doors of Mudslide Grill in a half stumble. When she called over her shoulder to let Kellaway know what was happening, she was hardly aware of it. She felt like she was floating outside of herself, watching it unfold from some haunted place outside of this world.
When she pulled the car out of the lot, she saw Kellaway at the door but didn’t acknowledge her. She had already started to cry and in some very dark place within her heart, wondered how she might herself commit suicide if she lost her daughter.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Avery felt like she was drunk. That was how beyond her senses she was as she parked her car in the lot of the ER. Her legs felt wobbly and her stomach was a tumultuous pit that made her feel like she might puke at any moment. She ran into the ER waiting room, running so quickly that she nearly collided with the glass window that separated the receptionist desk from the waiting room area. She got Rose’s check-in information and after showing her badge to one of the women behind the glass, was escorted as far into the emergency room as she was allowed to go.
When the woman stopped her before they reached the exam rooms, Avery nearly exploded. “No,” Avery said. “No�
�I need to see her and I need to see her now!”
“Ma’am, I understand your distress but even though you have that badge, there are certain rules we just can’t break. I’ve already paged to have the doctor come and speak with you and for now that’s just the best I can do.”
“Well, it’s not enough!”
The woman nodded. “I know. It’s not. But…those are the rules. You’re a cop…surely you understand the need for rules, right?”
It was an elementary tactic, but it worked. It also helped that as she stood at the intersection of four different hallways with the woman, she saw a doctor hurriedly approaching from the left. The woman who had escorted her saw the doctor coming, waved, and took her leave—probably glad to be rid of the panicked and bossy detective.
“Are you Ms. Black?” the doctor asked.
“I am. How’s Rose?”
He sighed and his eyes focused intently on her. My God, Avery thought. She’s dead. It’s too late. I’ve lost her…
“It’s too early to tell right now,” the doctor said. “However, if I had to make a bet—which I never would, by the way—I think she’s going to be okay.”
“And it was a suicide attempt?” Avery asked, still unable to believe it. “They’re sure of this?”
“Yes. And once we get the tests back, I’m pretty sure that will confirm it. She overdosed on Oxycontin. We don’t know how much she took, but the pill bottle was right there by her bed. If it knocked her out this bad, I’d assume she took at least seven to ten pills. Chased it down with half a beer. Nine-one-one got the call an hour ago. From Rose. She knew what she had done and apparently had some grief about it. Changed her mind. It’s the fact that she was coherent enough to make the call that makes me think her chances of pulling through are good. I will tell you, though, that when the medics arrived on the scene, she was unresponsive. She’s still unresponsive but we’re doing our very best to pull her through.”
“Can I see her?”
“Very soon. She’s only been in a room, stationary, for about five minutes. Let us finish getting her squared away and—”
“You don’t understand,” Avery said, feeling like her knees might fail her at any moment. “This is my fault. She did this because of me…because….”
She stuttered into a series of sobs at this point. The doctor stepped forward and braced her up with a hand to the shoulder. “Just a few more minutes and you can see her. You have my word on that.”
Avery nodded and took two steps to the left. There, she placed her back against the wall and slid down to the floor. She then bent her legs, pulling her knees toward her head, and wept as quietly as she could.
***
The doctor was true to his word. Avery was allowed into the room seven minutes later. Another one of those stuttering sobs came crawling out of her throat when she stepped through the doorway. Rose was lying motionless in bed, hooked up to a breathing tube. The doctor had warned her before entering that she was unconscious and could likely remain that way for at least a day or so.
There were still two nurses in the room, one of whom gave her a heartbreaking look. The other nurse was checking Rose’s vitals on a monitor that stood by the bed like a sentinel watching over the terrible scene.
Avery approached Rose’s bedside and took her hand. She squeezed it lightly and slowly sank into a chair. She was dimly aware of the nurses taking their leave as she broke into a crying fit. For a moment, she felt like the fabric of space and time had torn open and spit her right back to Ramirez’s bedside—when he had been coming around and sure to come home any day. Of course, that’s not how it had played out. He had been murdered in his hospital bed when she was elsewhere trying to find a killer.
Of course, the hand she now held was not Ramirez’s. Still, the implication was the same. Rose had done this to herself for some reason—likely for reasons closely related to her mother. The only glimmering hope in all of it was that, according to the doctor, Rose had changed her mind at the last moment and had called for help. So maybe all wasn’t lost. If Rose could change her mind in such a dark moment, maybe it meant there was also hope for repair between the two of them in the future.
How about you stop worrying how you can benefit from this and worry about her getting better, you selfish bitch, she told herself.
Because when it came down to the bare bones of it all, this was her fault. She was sure a therapist or any good friend would shoo this away, claiming that their stressed relationship might have been only a small part of Rose’s troubles. But Avery could still easily replay the brief visit to Rose’s apartment when Rose had screamed at her to get out.
No…this was pretty much one hundred percent her fault and she just had to learn to deal with that. Maybe it had been a mistake to go back to work so soon—or at all, for that matter. She had put Rose second again and look what had happened.
“I didn’t know what else to do…” Avery said. “Rose, I’m sorry. I didn’t know where to go or what to do and without Ramirez…work seemed the only option.”
She had no idea if Rose could hear her or not but admitting it all out loud was freeing. It also brought on another bought of weeping. Avery stayed there, at Rose’s bedside, her daughter’s limp hand held tightly in her own.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Janice Saunders could feel the migraine coiling around the inner workings of her head, tightening its grip like a python. She felt it behind her right eye first, as usual. But it was stretching out to the back and then around the base of her skull. She’d had enough of them to know what was coming and was glad that her work day was over. She was walking up the steps to her porch when she felt the first real pangs of the migraine hit and her thoughts instantly turned to the ibuprofen in her medicine cabinet and the peppermint essential oil on her bedside table.
The headaches were a result of her job. As if the stress of putting together those stupid pointless government proposals wasn’t bad enough, staring at a computer screen for eight to ten hours straight was certainly a culprit as well. It was so bad that Janice would sometimes even skip watching TV on the nights when she’d had a particularly bad day. She was already five episodes behind on This Is Us and hadn’t even gotten to start the second season of Stranger Things.
She’d quit the damned job if it didn’t pay so well. With her next paycheck floating in her mind’s eye like some wavering finish line, Janice unlocked her front door. She pushed the door open, wondering if today would be the day the place no longer felt too big. Her husband had left a little over a year ago and the place still felt too big for her, like it was no longer hers. Some nights, it felt like it was trying to swallow her and—
As she pushed the door closed behind her, Janice noticed the mess that the living room was in. It made no sense at first but then a stark feeling of absolute terror seized every nerve and fiber within her body.
A series of clown faces were staring at her. Dolls, stuffed animals, cardboard cutouts that had been taped to the walls. They all smiled at her, their greasy painted grins like bloody gashes. She looked from wall to wall, like a deer caught in headlights. Her mind was too slow to reach the obvious question of where the hell they had all come from. In that moment, terror was all she knew.
There were at least thirty clown faces looking at her. They had been propped on her sofa, sitting on the bar area that separated the living room from the kitchen, on the living room floor. Some were the so-called cute antique clowns with jolly smiles. Others were the more menacing kind that newer generations had claimed as their own thanks to Stephen King.
She felt a scream rising up in her throat. She hoped that when it came out, it would unfreeze her knees so she could get the hell out of there. But with the scream came logic.
Someone put these here, she thought. Someone broke into your house and put them here. And they know about your thing with clowns…This is a mean prank, a very mean prank, and whoever broke into your house might still be here and—
Tha
t’s when a figure rose up from behind the bar from the kitchen side. They’d been hiding there the whole time. It was the figure of a man, dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants. She did not see his face because it was covered by a clown mask. The skin of it was a mottled gray and the sinister smile stretched from one side to the other, impossibly wide.
The man behind the mask let out a high-pitched giggling noise. And then he brought out the knife.
Still giggling manically, the clown climbed over the bar with insane agility, the knife raised in the air. Tufts of colorful hair flowed out behind him like pure nightmare fuel. Seeing this, that’s when Janice’s bladder let go.
Perhaps it was the warm trickle running down her legs that finally broke her free. With her heart slamming like a caged animal in her chest, Janice turned and headed for the door. Her hand was about three inches away from the knob when the knife plunged into her back, just below her right shoulder blade.
The pain was sharp and immense, particularly when the blade clanged against the bone of her shoulder. She cried out, partially in pain and partially the bloodcurdling scream her lungs had been working on for the last several seconds. She felt the knife pull away but then it was in her again, this time lower. Then again and again.
Her legs gave out and she went hard to the floor. The clown was on her, rolling her over onto her back. As it straddled her, her first fear was that she was going to be raped, but that was a fleeting worry. In a pool of her own urine and quickly spilling blood, she realized that the clown had other things on his mind.
The clown giggled again, his large face maddeningly close to her own as his little legion of dolls watched from behind him. He raised the knife and brought it down. She counted four times before a dim sort of darkness finally crept in front of her eyes. The last shuddering thought in Janice’s mind was if she had actually stayed alive long enough to actually feel her heart stop.
