“Just include anything you like.”
“That’s the problem. I like everything. It’s as if he’s sitting across from me talking.”
“Did he used to recite poetry to you?”
“No. It’s just the quality of his voice I remember.”
She laid her own composition book aside, reached out to rub her hand up and down his arm. “I wish you’d had more time together. It’s hard to lose your best friend.”
He touched her hand with his fingertips. “I have another best friend now.”
“It’s not the same though, is it? I miss my best friend too. Something closed up inside me after MaryKyle died. Something she had opened.”
He nodded. Laid his hand flat atop hers.
“Read me the poem,” she said. “Before I start crying.”
“It doesn’t have a title.”
“Titles are overrated.”
He smiled. Looked down at the composition book that lay open beneath his other hand. And he read:
A tree knows how to listen,
has heard and whispers
all the secrets of time.
And so I listen to the trees.
You must become as us
is the first thing they tell me.
So I clothe myself with bark
impervious to all rain.
That isn’t what we mean, they say.
So I send roots deep into the earth
and twist them around rocks
that will not be budged.
That isn’t what we mean, they say.
And so I spread my branches wide,
sprout leaves that block the sun,
cast shade on all below me.
That isn’t what we mean, they say.
And so I rise and stretch toward heaven,
imperturbable and grand.
That isn’t what we mean, they say.
And so, in surrender,
I bend before the wind.
I tremble and shiver and
drop my leaves.
I creak and fall,
succumb to ants and rot.
I turn to brown dust
that children kick when
they run past laughing.
Now you’re getting it,
all the trees that fell before me say.
Jayme sat silent for a while, thinking about the lines. “Definitely include,” she said.
“I wish I knew more about poetry. I was big on Rilke and Yeats a while back, but I don’t know anything more recent.”
“You’re not expected to be a critic.”
He nodded. Then marked the page with a sticky blue arrow.
“You want to call it a night?” she asked.
“Sure.” They laid the composition books back inside the box, and DeMarco lifted the box aside to set it on the floor. Almost simultaneously they turned off their lights, then rearranged their pillows and lay beside each other, holding hands.
In the darkness, she said, “You haven’t said a word about Samantha Lewis and Gillespie.”
“Still trying to piece it together and figure out how it’s relevant.”
“I had a bad feeling about Gillespie from the get-go.”
“He’s a narcissist for sure, and probably fooling around with at least one of his students. I’m not sure I can see him as a serial killer, though.”
“We at least need to interview him again,” Jayme said. “Or better yet, let’s talk to little Kaitlin first. She must have known Lewis, or at least knew of her. She might even be Lewis’s replacement in Gillespie’s bed.”
He nodded and gave her hand a squeeze, as if to signal the end of the conversation. She rolled onto her side and leaned against him, and closed her eyes.
“Do you ever hear a thump in your head?” he asked.
Her eyes came open. “On my head or in my head?”
“Inside. Back at the Humane Society,” he told her, “right before we left, I heard this loud thump inside my head. I’ve heard it a couple of times before too. It comes out of nowhere. Sounds like a door slamming shut. But it’s inside my head. It’s jolting, to say the least. You’ve never experienced anything like that?”
She pushed herself up on one elbow. “Not inside my head, no. Are you sure it’s not a real thump? Like the wind blowing a door shut, something like that?”
“Ninety percent sure. The first two times happened when I was in bed, and I actually got up and checked all the locks. Creeping around in the darkness with a gun in my hand.”
She touched the side of his head. “Does the thump hurt? Or is it just the sound?”
“I do feel it, but there’s no pain. More like the change of pressure you feel when a heavy door slams shut.”
“Oh babe,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”
“It’s nothing to worry about. Just annoying is all.”
“Are you still having difficulty breathing?”
“My chest feels heavy sometimes, but it’s no big deal.”
She put a hand to the mattress, pushed herself into a sitting position. “You don’t know if it is or not. It could be blood pressure or, I don’t know, something serious. Please go to a doctor and get yourself checked. Please tell me that you will.”
“We’ll see,” he said.
“I’m going to call in the morning and make an appointment for you.”
He smiled. Said, “Lie down, it’s okay. It’s nothing to worry about.” He closed his eyes and said nothing more, waited for her body to ease next to him again. And asked himself, What kind of door would keep slamming shut inside my head?
Thirty-Three
The next morning, she was up early. When he came downstairs forty minutes later, a cup of coffee was waiting at his spot at the kitchen table. As he pulled out the chair to sit, she, with the laptop open before her, said, “Good news. I found your slamming door online.”
“Seriously?” he said, and lifted the cup to his mouth.
“It’s called exploding head syndrome.”
“Oh, that sounds healthy.”
“It’s supposed to be harmless. As many as a fifth of all people experience it.”
“Okay, that’s a little more comforting. What causes it?”
“Nobody’s sure, but the general consensus is that it has to do with neurons discharging, for whatever reason neurons discharge.”
He thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “Neurons are electricity. And there’s nothing remotely electrical about the sound. I know how lightning sounds, and I know how an electrical explosion sounds. I know how a frying wire sounds. None of them sounds like a door banging shut.”
“There are a few other explanations, if you want to hear them. They aren’t exactly scientific.”
He cocked his head and stared at her.
“You took a hit from an energy weapon,” she said.
“From who?”
“The CIA. NSA. Shadow government. Take your pick.”
“Fascetti!” he said, but his grin was half-hearted.
“Not a possibility for you?”
“Next option.”
She laid a hand to her face, stretched her mouth into a cringe. “Evil spirits?”
“Thank you, but no. I don’t need no evil spirits mucking around in my brain.”
“I guess that leaves alien abduction.”
“Hmm,” he said. “That might be interesting.”
“You wouldn’t mind being abducted?”
“Depends on the alien. They obviously know more about reality than I do.”
“Whatever,” she told him. “I still want you to get a checkup.”
“You said it’s harmless.”
“I also said that nobody knows for sure what causes i
t. Just the name scares me. Exploding head syndrome.”
“Tell you what,” he answered, and took another sip of coffee. “You find me a doctor who is up-to-date on alien abductions, and maybe I’ll give it a shot.”
He felt the fraudulence in his grin, and knew she could detect it too. But how do you tell the woman you love that you fear you are falling apart, and in more ways than one?
Thirty-Four
Two hours later they climbed into their cars and headed west into Ohio. The sky was a scorched blue but with strange-looking stacks of clouds here and there, each one looking like piles of whipped cream layered on top of each other and flattened out, each with an ominous gray underbelly.
DeMarco had called the Canfield home of Mahoning County commissioner Grant Lewis III, father of Samantha Lewis, and arranged for a 9:00 a.m. meeting at his office in downtown Youngstown. In the meantime, Jayme sought to surprise Kaitlin Mahood, she of the skimpy Daisy Mae outfit, at the three-bedroom apartment she shared with two other students on the eastern edge of Arlington, just a few minutes from the HYC campus.
Only one roommate was home, a pink-cheeked blond of five seven or so. The oversized Browns jersey she wore did nothing to flatter her stocky figure. Jayme flashed her ID and said she was working with the county sheriff’s office. She asked for Kaitlin and was told by the roommate that she hadn’t been seen in two weeks. Jayme nodded and walked past the stunned girl and straight to the center of the room, where a fake granite counter separated the kitchen space from the living room.
The young woman closed the door but remained beside it. “Don’t you have to have a warrant or something?”
Jayme smiled. “I’m not searching anything.” She made a quick scan of the room. “Besides, warrants are for people trying to hide something. Are you hiding something?”
“I don’t even know why you’re here.”
“Let’s start with your name,” Jayme said as she removed a notepad and pen from a pocket. She continued to hold her smile, but it was the smile that said, You don’t want to mess with me. She had at least half a dozen smiles in her arsenal, each with a different message.
“Amber,” the girl said. “Bertell.”
“One r, two l’s?” Jayme asked as she wrote. “Like the insurance guy on the billboards?”
Amber nodded. “We’re not related.”
“Why don’t you have a seat,” Jayme said, and moved to the window, her back to the light.
Amber gave a half turn to one of the stools pushed against the counter, and sat facing Jayme. She kept her knees tight together, the heels of her bare feet hooked over the stool’s top rung. “Did Kaitlin do something illegal?” she asked.
“Two weeks since you’ve seen her,” Jayme said. “Is that an approximation?”
“I guess. Yeah.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I don’t know, it was, uh, I think the day after her friend was killed.”
Jayme looked up from her pad. “Samantha Lewis was Kaitlin’s friend?”
“I guess so.”
Now Jayme came away from the window. Paused beside one of the lightweight recliners facing the TV. Ran her hand over the headrest. “These are nice,” she said.
“They’re called zero gravity. The cushions come separately.”
Jayme slid the chair over the carpet, turned it to face Amber directly, and eased herself down. “Very comfortable,” Jayme said. “I just might get myself one of these.”
Then she leaned forward, gave the girl an encouraging smile. “I really need you to be as specific as you can, Amber. You’re telling me that Kaitlin and Samantha were friends, and Kaitlin left here the day after Samantha was killed. And you haven’t seen Kaitlin since that day. Is that correct?”
Amber nodded, kept her hands and arms close to her body. “She said she was going to go home for a while. Maybe the rest of the summer.”
“And were you and your other roommate friends with Samantha too?”
“We didn’t know her. Never met her.”
“She never came here to visit Kaitlin?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Jayme cocked her head slightly, her gaze fixed on the girl. “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
Amber shook her head. “We’re just roommates. It’s not like we’re close or anything. She’s a year ahead of Jenna and me.”
“Kaitlin is?”
A quick nod. “We all have different friends we hang out with.”
“But Kaitlin mentioned Samantha by name as her friend?”
“Um. I’m not really sure about that.”
“I need you to be sure, Amber. How often did she refer to Samantha? And in what context?”
“It was just that one time. We were all sitting around in here talking about the murder, the three of us and a few other kids. Then Kaitlin started crying and went into her bedroom. I went in after a couple minutes to ask if she was okay, and she was stuffing some clothes into her backpack. That’s when she said something like, ‘A friend of mine has been murdered. I need to get out of here for a while.’”
“Were those her exact words?”
“Pretty close anyway. I mean, it’s what I remember her saying.”
Jayme smiled. Closed up her notepad. “I need to take a look at her room, Amber. You’re okay with that, right?”
Amber’s forehead became pinched, her mouth puckered. “I don’t know…”
“Here’s the way it works,” Jayme told her, and spoke more softly now, her smile more motherly. “You say it’s okay, and the only place I look at is Kaitlin’s room. If you don’t say it’s okay, then I call the police, they get a warrant, and thirty minutes from now, I and two detectives do a full-scale search of the entire apartment. And if we find any kind of weed or pills or anything like that, even beer or wine bottles in your trash, if you’re under twenty-one, and I think you are…”
Amber sat with her entire body bunched up and tight, as if she had to urinate. “I guess if you have to it’s okay.”
“Thank you,” Jayme said.
She remained in Kaitlin’s room for over fifteen minutes, but found nothing that tied her to Samantha Lewis. When she returned to the living room, Amber was standing at the second-floor window, palms pressed to the glass. When Jayme spoke, the girl jumped as if jabbed with a pin.
“There seems to be a lot of stuff missing in there,” Jayme said. “Clothes and toiletries and so forth. A lot more than would fit into one backpack.”
“She might have come back when we weren’t here,” Amber said. “Me and Jenna both work four to ten at Barry Dyngles.”
Jayme nodded. Gave her a thanks, you’re doing well smile. “So as far as you know, Kaitlin is at home with her parents?”
“She lives with her dad mostly. He’s closest.”
“And where would that be?”
“Akron.”
“Have you taken any classes with a Dr. Gillespie?”
Amber’s eyes widened. “No,” she said.
“Why did that question surprise you?”
“It just… I don’t know. What does it have to do with Kaitlin?”
“I didn’t say it has anything to do with her. I just asked if you’ve taken any classes from him.”
“I haven’t,” Amber said. “Neither has Jenna.”
“His classes don’t interest you?”
“I mean, they might but… He’s supposed to be hard to get an A from. Most people are lucky to get a C.”
“How did Kaitlin do in his class?”
Amber shrugged. “Pretty girls always get As. Everybody knows that.”
And suddenly Jayme felt like throwing an arm around the girl, pulling her close. Instead she froze for a moment, then stood, took a business card from her pocket, and held it out to the girl. “You call me when you see
Kaitlin again, will you?”
Amber looked at the card, nodded, looked up at Jayme.
And Jayme, before turning to the door, said, while wishing she had something more inspirational to offer, something wise and true, “Young beauty fades. But the beauty in here”—and she tapped her chest—“it just keeps growing.”
She was moving down the hallway when she heard Amber at the apartment door. “I forgot about the thing tomorrow night,” the girl said.
Jayme turned, walked back. “What thing?”
“I guess there’s a memorial kind of thing at the Canfield High School.”
“Right, for Samantha Lewis. I heard about that.”
“I don’t know if Kaitlin will be there or not. But she might.”
“Thank you,” Jayme told her. She wanted to say more, something encouraging and empowering, but she had always resented the platitudes of others, those who had told her as a teen that she would grow into her long legs, that her sharp features would soften. They had been right, of course, but such words had done her no good at the time. So she ended her conversation with Amber with a nod and a smile.
And for the next few moments, as she walked down the hall to the elevator, Jayme remained puzzled by the urge she had felt to embrace and comfort Amber. She thought she had taught herself to keep emotions out of her work. In the academy, cadets were taught to moderate emotions when dealing with both perpetrators and victims. Neither anger nor pity serves a law enforcement officer well in the line of duty. Emotion tends to cloud the brain.
Jayme had initially thought this philosophy an oxymoron. Didn’t one choose a career in law enforcement precisely because of a desire to help others? Some did and some didn’t, she came to understand. There were also those who joined for the uniform and gun and what they represented, what they made possible. They endowed one with an authority the individual would never have otherwise. A self-image otherwise impossible to achieve. And for others, the rules and guidelines of law enforcement provided a definable framework for living.
Liabilities accompanied all of these motivations. The most rigid of the by-the-book individuals could make life miserable for others, and often found themselves with rebellious children of the same ilk as preachers’ kids. Those who joined for the power trip learned that they were seldom top dog, always subject to the authority of others, and so took out their hunger for power not only on suspected criminals but also on the innocent, most often their wives and children. And those with an overabundance of empathy for the oppressed often became victims of the bottle and other medications to numb their depression and suicidal thoughts.
A Long Way Down Page 15
