The Coworker: The First Nate Castle

by Vernon Rush

  Nate’s communication with Jack was interrupted with the long-awaited call from Daria. Just as he was scared to death that she had become Number Six, she called. “Where have you been?” he scolded. “Do you realize there is a murderer on the loose out there?”

  Daria laughed so hard it took at least a minute for her to speak. “Are you for real? How many times did you tell me I had nothing to worry about? I am sorry for being out of contact. I have had Montezuma’s revenge.”

  “I’m strangely comforted by that,” he responded. “Speaking of that, a lot of weird shit has been going on.”

  “Where you now?” Daria asked. “I’ll come by.”

  “I’m wrapping up a meeting now and on my way down to the police station.”

  “Meeting with who?” Daria snapped. She was still having highs and lows, Nate noted. It was probably way too much to expect for either of them to get over the facts of this case in a linear, immediate fashion. It was going to come and go.

  “A bunch of drunks, dear,” he laughed. That was yet another code word for Nate and his twelve step group to which he was feeling particularly attached.

  “Are you kidding me? I think this might be a personal record,” she said acerbically. “It’s probably okay to have one or two by now, don’t you think? What’s say we go down to Jerry’s?”

  Nate knew that many people around the alcoholic who were the first to beg him to get sober were ironically the first people to put a beer in his hand. Daria was nicely normal in that respect. His sobriety was robbing her, in a way, of a huge component of her social life. They had bonded over his intoxication.

  “Didn’t you just admit to having a grave intestinal disorder? And besides, it doesn’t work that way. If I could ever have just one, I wouldn’t be having just none now. You know I never drink while I am on a case.”

  “On a case.” Daria snorted. “You make it sound so serious.”

  Daria’s behavior, like Dan Klein’s, was extraordinarily out of sorts.

  “I am a credentialed academic and a licensed private investigator and I have served as an expert witness on more than one occasion, Ms. McCarroll.”

  “I realize that, but I thought it was more about an amateur interest than a bona fide… you know… pursuit.”

  Something in Daria’s voice made her sound to Nate like she was a bit jealous of his work. Maybe he had been neglecting her a little. “I have to meet Jack at the station. We are going over some photo IDs.”

  “Of what?” Daria asked.

  “Weston & Hale kept copies of all of the pictures of all their employees over the past three decades. We are going to go over them.”

  “Well, I guess it can wait,” she said.

  Nate was right. It wasn’t what she said; it was what she didn’t say. Daria never asked for much and in her way, he was sure she was asking him. It wasn’t good timing but Nate was moved. “Daria, if you need me, I am yours. You know I have time for you. Jack can get started without me.”

  “Well, I was hoping you could swing by my place because I’m still not feeling strong. Maybe bring some potato brioche from the Creamery. I was just kidding about the alcohol. I am glad you’re doing good with that,” she said, her tone sentimental.

  “Will do,” Nate said. “I will just re-route a few things and be right over.”

  He filled Jack in on the plans and swung by the Creamery to pick up pastries for them both, along with a bagel with cream cheese for himself and a yogurt and fruit for Daria. It was a most peculiar day indeed, what with being ambushed twice by the very weird Dan Klein and now being asked out of the blue to Daria’s house. He could count on one hand the number of times that invite was extended but somehow averted. He had never made it to her front door. If he had been a sober man the entire time, it might have made a difference but to a drunk, these sorts of things didn’t matter.

  As Nate drove his little roller skate, as she called it, up the worn tracks in the grass that stood for a driveway, it occurred to him he had never really gotten a good look at this house up close. He had driven by when both he and the house were half lit. The house was in fairly unassuming severe disrepair. This was not obvious from the road and something about its wide white planks disguised the fact. It just looked like many of the other houses that were set out on non-standard lots. Frederick, outside of old town, was rural and rustic.

  As Nate approached the door, whose jamb he now saw had no trim, the smell was overwhelming. He scanned for some possible source. A busted septic. Trash. In the country, people were required to haul their refuse to the city dump. Only developed neighborhoods had regular pickup. But there was no trash that he could see.

  As Nate took the degraded steps to Daria’s front door, the smell took on a more intense character; different from the smell of Emily Fabian’s dead body but as intense and indelible. It was the smell of vastly progressed rot. His poor beleaguered brain had had to tackle so much these past few days as a sober man, the fact that he was absorbing now was a mite too much to handle. His best friend lived in squalid conditions. She was an anomaly, his friend; smart, beautiful, loyal, and yet, with modest exception, a bit of a recluse. The aversion now was not accidental but intentional, and Nate wondered how many people besides Daria had crossed into the house in recent years. He braced himself for what he thought he might see once she opened up the door to let him in. He didn’t make contact with the door before Daria opened it. She didn’t look well and she didn’t look right.

  No she didn’t look right at all. Daria greeted him in the most bizarre getup. Not the sweet little suit she usually wore, but a man’s pants and a dirty overcoat. Daria offered him some coffee and he drank some. She had been ill, he realized, but those clothes made for odd lounging pajamas. There was a truth here somewhere and he wasn’t connecting to it. It was as though she had cast a spell on him and he was doing a dumb thing by walking into the house, for he had no better judgment. He wanted to believe that all was good.

  ***

  Nothing in the world—no case study, no amount of reading or seeing it on TV—could have prepared Nate for the status of Daria’s home. Her house was so overwhelming, so awful, that her weird getup had little effect on him. And there was no containing his expression. He was certain he had disassociated and was no longer able to contain his shock. His total shock. The adrenalin that surged through him upset his gut, but as he processed the visual of mounds upon mounds of nameless paper, rotten and wet from unsealed roof and walls, he began to calm enough to vomit. Nate bent at the waist and his empty stomach felt as though it surged through his throat, together with the distinct feel of something tearing in his belly and maybe even herniating.

  “Oh God,” he prayed. And then he lied. “I must have what you have.”

  The remark insulted her. She laughed with hostility, with incredulity. “You think you have what I have?” she asked rhetorically. “Yeah, right.”

  Nate took one look, one whiff, which was not going to leave him anytime soon, and wondered how it was Daria wasn’t ill all the time. She was a full-blown hoarder. He knew that people were great at hiding these things. She was his best friend and had been his only friend for years. The facts slowly morphed into clues and became obvious, in retrospect. They were indeed hidden in plain sight, waiting for him to notice this entire time. It was not like his own alcoholism, though that he wore on his sleeve. Some folks functioned fully for years until their bodies gave out. All things addictive, whether it was booze or the objectification, had their shelf life. And perhaps Daria’s revelation, her sharing of her home, was the announcement that her problem had come to its end as well.

  It broke his heart to comprehend that his beloved friend lived in such conditions. But it made sense of the fact that she toted the messenger bag, crammed with papers that probably could use a weeding out. She seemed so together in every way; the bag to him always was a glaring incongruence. He also got why she was so leery of parting with her bag. Hoarders made emotional attachments to
things and the bag was more than special to her. Things were very powerful; placement of things was very powerful to a hoarder. He got that as an academic; as a human being, he didn’t understand much at all.

  Nate patiently waited while Daria cleared a space on her sofa so that they could sit down. He cringed as he sank into the almost-soupy couch. The smell that woodshed up as he pressed into the foam was of rotted garbage. It was sweet and putrid and inescapable. The smell had become the elephant in the room. The coffee in his hand, though still warm from the Creamery, was now burning his palm because he really didn’t feel like swallowing anything that touched his lips in this room.

  “You’re shocked I live this way,” Daria said finally.

  “Well, yes, a little,” said Nate understatedly. There were no words. The mountains of trash, his friend, and the fact that he had no earthly idea.

  “I guess I am too,” she said. She looked down at the ground and not at him for the first time since he arrived. Her eyes had been fixed on him until then, watching his every nuance, he felt.

  “After all that talk about being afraid of living in a rooming house because you felt closed in? This is a pretty, pretty crowded. How do you stand it?” Nate had definitely put on his Psychology hat now. His voice grew soft and patronizing.

  Daria retrogressed. He estimated she was about twelve years old.

  “Sometimes I feel like the world is going to fall in on me,” she said. “And sometimes I feel as though I am in a secure nest. I hate my world and love it at the same time. Do you know what I mean?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Nate conceded. “It’s just like me and drinking. Love to drink. Love it, love it. But I can tell you, I also loathe myself for it. So how about you? Any conscious feelings of self-hate you want to get off your chest?”

  “I am not proud of myself. No. And I think it’s part of the reason why I can’t commit to a steady gig.”

  “I definitely can relate to that,” he interjected. “We might be more alike than different.” That seem to settle her.

  “Just when I start to do something about it,” she continued, “I can’t wrap my mind around why I should. It’s like I can’t remember,” she said.

  It had become a weird situation of normalcy and unreality. They were sitting in a room crammed with untold trash, incomprehensible rank, on a damp couch, shooting this breeze about character defects. Somehow, Nate was aware, she had sucked him in. He was being manipulated.

  Still he related. “I do understand that. We refer to it all the time in the rooms. A built-in forgetter. We can have our ass kicked by booze and want to quit. But let us feel a little better, and we are at the bottle again. You want to stop, but then it does something for you.”

  “That’s it, exactly. You think they have a twelve step group for me?” Daria laughed.

  “Maybe they do. If not, we can certainly convert my program to suit your problem. You are powerless over hoarding; your life has become unmanageable.”

  Daria’s hackles were raised. That fast she was uncomfortable with Nate’s gentle prodding towards change. He had crossed the line that quickly. “Wow, it’s not unmanageable. It’s just messy.”

  The absolute slam of the fact of her living conditions passed and Nate began to focus on the uncharacteristic getup that she was in. This was not the Daria he knew. She had not bothered to wear her always neat-as-a-pin attire. For once, it seemed, her outside matched her insides. Nate was also aware he was processing the situation in parts and that his mind could be denying some critical things because they already knew them to be true. Daria was not at all—and never had been—who he thought her to be.

  Or maybe it was the coffee she’d given him. He began to feel the first quiver of terror. His self-defense in this situation was to, as politely as possible, extricate himself from the house as quickly yet uneventfully as he could. He could not simply dash; it was an all-encompassing booby trap.

  “Gotcha. You let me know if you want any help with any of it.” Nate watched her sip her tea without a care for the germs that might be chasing in after it. It was all he could do to keep from gagging. He was trying to fully grasp that he was sitting amid a garbage strewn room that reeked like the city dump. He recollected Jack Wilcox’s admonishment about how toxic the murder scene had been. This scene could not be any safer. He would have to scald what he was wearing and then hose down himself.

  “You get a few days clean and sober and suddenly you are Carrie Nation, blazing a path against every bad habit. Since when did a little character become a mental illness?” She shrugged. Her voice was tense in a way she just never was.

  “So…” He tried to make conversation, just to bide his time to leave so her feelings would be spared. “I think I have a stalker in Dan Klein.”

  “The little detective guy?” Daria scoffed. “Ha! And you were so flattered he knew you wrote a book. Did we ever check him out to see if he was the do-er?”

  A warm shame swirled within him. The fact that the diminutive Det. Klein was familiar with him and his work had played with his head. Frederick was a small town and as a lifelong citizen and a figure in the community, he should be known, but the cops saw him as suspicious black man and therefore a thug. It had been nice for a moment to be randomly admired. It was not so easy to accept that Klein’s admiration might have been a symptom of mental illness. “Yeah, well, he might be a stalker.”

  And Nate’s psychological bifurcation began to fuse. No, he did not consider Dan for the killer. With a wave of intense emotion, he suddenly had a very short list and he believed he was sitting next to its only member.

  He wondered if she had some idea and was playing him. Acting as if all was cool as he was doing, when he knew it was far from it.

  Daria shoved him hard. Nate cringed at the thought she might have forced him into contact with more filth. The butt of his pants was wet, as though he had been drinking and he blacked out. He would throw the clothes away when he got first chance. Out of nowhere, she gave him another boisterous shove. “Get out!” she shouted, reeled in to the story.

  “Yes,” he explained. “He showed up at my house this morning. He moved around the house like he knew it inside and out. You and I were talking about how alike these places are. But like I turned around in the house and there he was. Casual as you please and then again at my AA meeting.” Nate shook his head at the weirdness of the past few months.

  “You are flypaper for freaks, Dr. Castle,” she remarked, as she sat in a knit cap, the mix-matched component to the man’s suit. Nate spied further: He believed she had on men’s shoes.

  “That’s not all. I’ve been let go,” he said. That actually was the only thing he was glad of in his world at the moment.

  “What? My God, I get sick for a few days and the whole world changes,” she remarked.

  While he observed her acting like they were same Daria and Nate, the truth stacked upon itself as though he were reading a student’s paper and he was arriving at the gist of things. Nate had to be brave and move into acceptance. As they said in the rooms: For recovery, acceptance was the solution to all his problems.

  He was about launch into the story about how his boss was seeing Emily Fabian, but if she had been out of the loop because she had been ill, he wasn’t sure how much she had heard about the woman who had been her contact. “Have you been listening to the news? Daria, Emily Fabian has been murdered.”

  Daria made a classic ‘did-I-just-hear-you-right?’ face.

  Nate put a gentle hand on her shoulder, minding the surroundings less and less as their conversation got somewhat emotional. “I wigged out at the scene of Emily Fabian’s murder. It was a bloody butcher knife… gruesome picture. While you were here with a touch of Mexico, I was in a psych ward sleeping off the effects of a grisly murder scene.”

  “Stop,” she clutched him. “Stop.”

  He looked at Daria and her eyes were vise as though she was more than pained by the news.

  “Yeah, I don’t even
want to think about it,” he said “Emily had hinted that she was involved with someone at the school and I didn’t put two and two together. So when I get out of the hospital, I go meet with my boss, who’d sent me an urgent message to come see him right away. But get this. Bill, my boss, left Emily to shack up with Jack Wilcox’s wife. He broke up their marriage and they are now engaged.”

  “You know,” Daria said cryptically, as though she were scolding him, “I did tell you to let me handle that.”

  Nate was shaken by her mood shift. He knew plenty of angry drunks who were perfectly nice people but in the throes of their disease were vicious animals. Daria, he believed, was in the throes of her disease. He was diagnosing her as they sat. Dissociative personality disorder. Split personality. He noted, too, that there was no responsibility on her part. She was basically blaming him for Emily’s death. “Do you think she would be alive now if I had?”

  “We’ll never know,” she answered, wrenched at the news about Emily. “Things are such a mess right now; you would have to draw me a map to follow.”

  “Kid,” Nate said quietly. “You can’t live here. It’s not fit. Let me move you to the Frederick Inn for a week and I’ll arrange for some volunteers at what used to my mother’s church to come take care of this.” As he was saying that, he saw this was a job for HazMat. It probably was unsafe to be there at all.

  His phone buzzed. “I gotta take this,” he said and without any more consideration to Daria, he went for his phone to check his messages. He pulled it out of his back pocket and as he did, out slipped the piece of folded up paper that he had taken out of Daria’s messenger bag to write notes on. Reflexively, he caught the paper and checked his phone. It was a text from Jack with an urgent signal and it appeared to attach a picture.

  “Do you have a pen? And something hard I can write on?” Nate asked her. He unfolded his paper to record impressions of what Jack sent him. Daria hand him a pen and a cookie sheet that she’d bought and never used. He nodded because it happened to make a really good desk. He pressed the paper to the back of the cookie sheet and opened up the picture that Jack sent. It was a picture Jack had taken of one of the pages of badges from Weston & Hale. It was a pretty dated selection and it came with no caption. Obviously, Nate was supposed to discern why Jack sent it on sight and slowly he did. It was an image, about fifteen or so years old, of a woman with a Mona Lisa smile and dark brown hair, in a crisp suit and white dress shirt. Nate didn’t recognize the name but he recognized the face.