by Kacey Gene
“Oh, it’s no problem. I just wish I knew Jennifer had company.” She throws Jennifer a disapproving and menacing glare when she says this. “I wouldn’t have come over here in this state if I’d known there was such a man here.” Mrs. Muscolino apprehensively touches the curlers she has tightly rolled in her hair and adjusts her cotton nightgown that has sleeping cows on it.
“I’m not sure you could look more beautiful,” Jake says with a smile. “Although, I’m always happy to be proven wrong by a woman.”
Jennifer almost gags right then and there, but then she sees the effect Jake’s words have on Mrs. Muscolino. She’s beaming like the high noon sun.
“Okay,” Jennifer says, grabbing the edge of the door, “we’re sorry about the noise, Mrs. Muscolino, and we’ll get to the bottom of what happened.”
Before Mrs. Muscolino can protest and lure Jake into more compliments, Jennifer shuts the door, only to hear Mrs. Muscolino say, “With manners like that, she’ll never keep that man.”
Jennifer shakes her fists at the door, and Jake breaks into laughter.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Jennifer says. “Flirting with a vulnerable eighty-seven year old.”
“Don’t get jealous,” Jake says with a sly smile. “She does have better nightwear than you, but--”
Jennifer playfully hits his arm before he can get another word out. She turns back to look at her windows, and somehow, the sun has sneakily peeked through the dark sky and turned it a light shade of crystal pink. It’s just enough light to illuminate the brown goop that is starting to cake and freeze on her windows.
Jake, seeing that her attention has focused back on the attack, walks over to the windows with her. They look at the brown substance like it’s a piece of art in a museum -- investigating it from far away, up close, and then from different angles.
“Come on,” Jake says, nodding to her bedroom. “Whoever did this can’t hide under the night sky anymore.”
They go into her room and step out onto her balcony. Jennifer wraps her arms around herself when the cold air hits against her bare legs and arms. She wishes she could wear pants and long sleeves to bed, but at night she heats up like the inside of a cooked sweet potato, so full pajamas are basically an overheating death sentence. She learned this the hard way when she was six years old and begged her parents for footie pajamas. She got a pair for Christmas, immediately put them on, and she almost spontaneously combusted that same night. From then on, it’s always been tank dresses for bed, which is proving to be worthless against this cold December air.
Jake leans over the edge of her balcony so he can get a better look at the outside of her windows. He realizes exactly what Jennifer put together earlier -- there’s no way someone could have launched this substance from the ground.
He looks across the way at the other apartments, which reach to nine floors and create a U-shape.
“Do you have binoculars?” he asks.
“I do,” Jennifer says, running inside.
Her bedroom has two closets, which most women would fill with shoes, dresses, and purses, but not Jennifer. Her smaller closet is dedicated to clothes and accessories, while her larger closet -- which she can stand in the middle of and spin around in with her arms out -- is dedicated to crafting.
She heads into that closet and walks past the white shelves on her right that hold overflowing baskets of yarn, her two sewing machines that her Aunt Jamie got her a few years back, past the jars full of crochet hooks, thread, and bobbins, and she touches the silk ribbon she just bought. It hangs on the wall with dozens of other ribbons.
In the back she has an antique dressmaker’s dummy that holds different pieces of jewelry and scarves she’s made. She loves the way the chunky red and cream scarf she crocheted last week, and that will be perfect for Valentine’s Day, contrasts against the dark iron of the dummy. But her binoculars are on the other side of her closet -- the side with reams of wrapping paper anchored to the wall and shelves full of glue guns, fake flowers, buttons, beads, and dozens of books on everything from candle making and canning to flower arranging and decoupaging.
“There they are,” Jennifer says, reaching up to the top shelf and grabbing the binoculars. Jennifer never uses these. Her dad gave them to her on her fifteenth birthday. That same night he told her to point them at the sky, and he directed her to a specific star.
“It’s our star,” he said.
He’d bought it for her. Named it after the two of them. And just when she was going to ask him, “Are you being serious?” he handed her the certificate. There it was in writing -- star number A2453 was now named “Sammy and Jennifer.”
“This way we can always be together,” he said, “no matter what.”
Jennifer should have seen that little gift as a warning. A warning that her dad was going to disappear, which he did two years later -- the day she went to college. No more birthday cards, no more birthday phone calls, and no more communication at all.
By her junior year at the University of Iowa, and three years of silence from her dad, Jennifer stopped expecting anything. At first she asked Jake to have his dad investigate what happened to Sammy, but Jake talked her out of it. He said it would only hurt more.
So Jennifer swore she’d forget her dad, just like he’d forgotten her. She also swore she’d never stargaze again. Yet, she kept the binoculars.
Jennifer shakes those memories and the sadness that’s spreading through her out of her mind and heads back to Jake. “That’s the past,” Jennifer tells herself as she closes her closet door. Through her bedroom windows she sees Jake eyeing something in his hand.
The second she steps back onto the balcony he says, “It’s pudding. And it was launched in balloons,” he says, holding up a hot pink shred of latex.
“Seriously?” Jennifer asks. “More pudding?”
“Yep,” Jake says, taking the binoculars from her. He scans the apartments across the way, and Jennifer immediately worries that her neighbors are going to think they’re a couple of perverts -- out at 6:30 in the morning and aiming binoculars at the apartments across from them.
But then Jake’s scanning stops. He holds the binoculars steady and looks over at her.
“We found our launching pad,” he says, gesturing for Jennifer to come look. She stands in front of him as he holds the binoculars steady. She feels the warmth coming from his body behind her, and she wants to snuggle into it, but then she looks through the binoculars and sees exactly what Jake saw.
The apartment one up and two over from hers has a giant hole cut out in the glass door leading to the balcony, and in that hole is a tube that looks perfect for launching small, circular objects.
“You know who lives there?” Jake asks.
“Of course not. I only learned the names of everyone on my floor this year.”
“Well, get dressed,” Jake says. “You’re about to meet a new neighbor.”
Chapter Seven
Marley’s Ghost Returns
After dozens of unanswered knocks on the door of 9N, a stench that smells like burnt rubber emanating from the bottom of the door, and a warning of Jake saying, “We will break down the door if you don’t answer,” Jake tells Jennifer to step back.
He pulls out his billy club and strikes the door knob. It takes a few hits, but the brass knob eventually gives and falls to the floor. With a hole in the door, Jake pulls out the hook wire he has, fishes it through the hole, and unlatches the dead bolt. Luckily, this apartment owner doesn’t use the chain on his door, so Jake easily pushes it open.
But Jennifer wishes that door never opened. At first, all she sees is the body. It’s slumped over in a chair like a melted candy cane. But it’s the smell that forces her to turn her head away and cover her nose.
“My God,” Jake says, immediately pulling out his phone and calling for backup. He puts his hand on Jennifer’s back. “Go wait outside,” he says, but she refuses to leave. Then they both look toward the kitchen, whic
h is the main culprit for the stench.
Just like at Fred’s, there’s a giant pot of pudding on the stove, but this batch is scorched, burnt, and blackened to a crisp, and it smells like burnt doll hair.
Jennifer, wanting to keep her distance from the body, watches Jake as he walks over to the victim and feels for a pulse. That’s when Jennifer sees the chains criss-crossing across the victim’s chest. Those chains anchor him against the chair and are the only thing stopping this man from folding over on himself.
“Anything?” Jennifer asks, reminding herself to breathe deeply and slowly.
Jake shakes his head. No pulse.
Jennifer has seen terrible crime scenes before, but something about this one rattles her. A big part of her wants to turn away, to run to her apartment and bake the cookies she needs to make and crochet the tree skirt and stockings she’d planned to focus all of her attention on before Jake showed up in her classroom. But then she reminds herself why she’s here. She’s here to catch the people that do this. To stop future crimes from ever happening. Cookies and stockings will have to wait.
She shakily steps to where Jake and the victim are, and that’s when she sees the cuts. This man is not only chained to his chair, but he has cuts on his arms and all over his legs.
But superficial cuts won’t kill a person, and Jennifer’s heart pulls on her brain with the question she always wonders.
“Could we have saved him?” she asks Jake. Her words and her hands shake as she scans the victim’s body for an obvious fatal mark, but it’s all superficial wounds. Was this man left to starve to death? Is that how he died? she wonders.
Jennifer rubs her neck as her anxiety fizzles through her body. “If I would have woken you up earlier. Or if we would have discovered the launch pad earlier. Maybe we could have gotten here and saved his life,” Jennifer says, her words frantically falling out of her. “Instead we wasted time talking to Mrs. Muscolino. We could have saved him, Jake. We could have saved him.”
Jake pulls her into a hug and uses his soothing, deep voice and the facts to calm her.
“No, Jennifer, we couldn’t have,” he says, side-eyeing the man’s body. The cuts on his arms and legs aren’t red or fresh. Whomever did this might have killed this man last night or even the day before -- the same day they found Fred Gailey murdered.
“You promise we couldn’t have saved him?” Jennifer asks, looking up at Jake but keeping her head pressed against his chest.
“You know I never lie to you,” Jake says, and Jennifer sees his face change. Yes, he’s concerned about her. Yes, he’s trying to comfort her. But there’s something else there. An unstated desire; something he wants to tell her and never has. And, he looks like he’s on the edge of a confession, which completely unravels her.
She no longer wants her face that close to his, so she mumbles a soft apology for her reaction, pulls away, and turns toward the victim.
Jake, not wanting to live in the tension that just came into the room, gets closer to the body and has to cover his nose due to the stench that smells like hot garbage.
“What is that?” Jake asks, examining the burns closer. A few of them have a thick almost gooey substance in them. “It’s like the killer cauterized the cuts, but with...” Jake pulls out the wire he used to unbolt the lock and pokes one of the wounds. He brings the gooey-coated end of the wire to his nose and sniffs.
“Let me guess,” Jenifer says, eyeing the brown substance.
“Pudding,” Jake says, confirming what Jennifer thought.
Jennifer plays out the scene in her mind and realizes that this man wasn’t just killed, he was tortured.
“The killer wanted some kind of information from him,” Jennifer says, knowing that where there are torture tactics there are almost always questions in need of answering. But what could this man know? He looks around the same age as Fred Gailey; he has white hair just like Fred; but while Fred was thin and gaunt, this man has a bulbous stomach and legs and arms as thick as tree trunks.
Jennifer sees that he’s wearing a white cotton nightshirt. It’s one of those old ones she’s seen in movies about 19th-century England -- the kind that come down to the knees and look like they should be paired with a nightcap like in ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.
“Look at this,” Jake says, having moved behind the chair where the man is chained. Jennifer steps around the chair, and she can barely believe what she’s seeing.
There’s an old safe at the base of the chair, and it’s the hub for all the chains that crisscross across the victim’s chest. The safe has four legs, which are iron and look almost spider-like due to the way they curve out and have a sleek, oil color. Those legs prop up and hold the body of the safe, which looks to weigh at least 50 pounds. Jennifer and Jake crouch down to get a better look at it, and that’s when they see the etchings. There are currency signs, sketchings of banks, and drawings of coins on the safe.
Those images, the safe itself, and the chains around the man finally link together in Jennifer’s mind. “Why didn’t I see it?” she asks, standing up and frantically looking for a bookshelf. But there isn’t one book in the main room.
“See what?” Jake asks, following her gaze, which moves from one wall to the next and then to the next. Jennifer runs into the man’s bedroom without a word, and Jake quickly follows behind.
“The books,” Jennifer says. “We need to find the books.”
“Jennifer, you aren’t making any sense.”
“It’s A Christmas Carol,” she says. “The killer made the victim into Marley.”
“Marley?” Jake asks.
“You didn’t read the book last night, did you?” Jennifer says, pretending to be disappointed.
“Well, I planned to,” Jake says, “but then I found out that my best friend made a date with a guy who possibly tried to kill us. My mind was occupied with things other than reading.”
“Fair point,” Jennifer says, instantly feeling awkward with the reference to Matt. She opens the victim’s closet, hoping to see a shelf of books, but she’s greeted with nothing but clothes and racks of shoes. “In A Christmas Carol Marley’s ghost visits Scrooge to warn him of all the spirits that will come to him that night. When Marley arrives he’s covered in chains and he’s dragging a safe,” Jennifer says, looking at Jake, who is as surprised as she is by these words.
As Jennifer pushes through this man’s tweed coats and button-down shirts, she loses hope that there are any books in this closet. But then, she freezes. Right before her, hanging in the very back of this man’s closet, is a puffy, velvety red Santa suit. And it’s the nicest Santa suit she’s ever seen. The velvet is plush, the white trim of the suit has silver strands woven through it, and the gleaming black belt is perfectly polished and carefully anchored around the hanger’s neck.
“Oh-kay,” she says, pulling out the suit for Jake to see.
“Wow. That’s the fanciest Santa outfit I’ve ever seen,” Jake says, taking the suit from Jennifer’s hands. He looks at the front and the back of it as he concludes, “It looks like our John Doe was a really classy Santa somewhere.”
Jennifer can feel that this suit and the information are important, but for right now, she has one mission, which is to find those Dickens books that she knows are in this apartment.
The victim’s apartment is the exact same layout as her apartment -- with the open kitchen that overlooks the main room, which is where the fireplace is. He has the same set of large windows on the back wall, so his bathroom and linen closet must be tucked in the hallway behind the kitchen. That means this man will also have a second closet in his bedroom.
And just as she predicted, there’s a door next to the closet she’s standing in front of. But this closet doesn’t just have a door knob. It has a padlock battening down the hatches.
“We need to get in that closet,” Jennifer says, looking at Jake, who is turning the Santa suit and looking at every stitch. Jennifer switches her gaze to Jake’s billy c
lub, and that gets his attention.
“We really should wait for the other officers to get here. This is a crime scene, and we shouldn’t tamper with anything else.”
Jennifer knows he’s right. She knows they should do the responsible thing and follow protocol, but she also knows that there’s a murdered man in the next room. And even though Jake says they couldn’t have saved him, Jennifer believes she could have. If they would have dug up more information on Fred then maybe it would have led them to this man before the killer got here. After all, both victims are around the same age, and their murders connect to the same Dickens novel. And Jennifer has no intention of being steps behind again. She’s here to save lives, not follow protocol.
So she calmly moves toward Jake and says, “I know you’re right,” and when she sees that his guard is down and his focus is back on the snazzy Santa suit, she grabs the billy club from his belt, turns to the closet and attacks the padlock.
After three solid whacks the padlock drops to the ground.
“Remind me never to get on your bad side,” Jake says, disapprovingly holding out his hand and requesting his club back.
Jennifer apologizes, hands it to him, and throws open the closet door.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jennifer says, when she sees towers and towers of pudding boxes. They reach from floor to ceiling, and they are the exact same brand and box — greyish white background with large print black letters -- as the ones in Fred’s kitchen cabinet. And just like at Fred’s, they’re empty.
“What is going on with this pudding?” Jake asks, but Jennifer can’t even focus on his question because there in the back of the closet is the set of Dickens books that she was looking for. They’re wrapped in red leather rather than green leather like the ones at Fred’s house, but they have the exact same gold script and gold-edged pages.
Jennifer moves closer to them and reads the titles: A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Barnaby Rudge.
