A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  Lewis straightened, and Kaitlin went stiff.

  “Griffin,” Jayme said, “I just want to say again how sorry I am for your loss. It’s a terrible thing to have to suffer.”

  He said, “What are you doing here?”

  “My job,” she answered. “Trying to find the person responsible for this.”

  “You couldn’t leave us alone for one night?” Kaitlin asked.

  “I’m surprised you would want us to take a rest.” Jayme turned to the other girl and smiled. “Hi, I’m Jayme Matson. Are you one of Dr. Gillespie’s students too?”

  Hesitatingly, the girl reached out to take Jayme’s hand, but Griffin’s hand shot out to push the girl’s hand away. “You don’t have to talk to her,” he said. “She’s not the police. And even if she was.”

  Jayme smiled at the girl. “My partner and I are former Pennsylvania State Police. We’re now attached to the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office as special investigators. So yes, we are the police. May I ask your name, please?”

  “You don’t have to tell her anything,” Lewis said.

  But the girl answered, though timidly. “Rebecca Sadler,” she said. “Becca.”

  “And are you also one of Dr. Gillespie’s students?”

  “Last semester I was.”

  Griffin blew out a breath in disgust. Scowled and shook his head.

  “And who is the boy who just now walked away?”

  “This is illegal,” Griffin said. He turned, reached for his door, and popped it open. “You’re not allowed to talk to us without lawyers present.”

  “That’s incorrect,” Jayme told. “It’s true that you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. But I’m having a hard time understanding why you wouldn’t want to. Aren’t you anxious to find out who killed your sister?”

  He glared at her for a moment, then turned to the girls. “I’m outta here,” he told them. “You need a ride, Becca?”

  “I’ll take her,” Kaitlin said.

  “Whatever.” He climbed inside and slammed the door. The females stood aside and watched the vehicle pull away. The tires screeched when he turned onto the street.

  Jayme said, “Is it me, or is he always angry about something?”

  The only response was a quick scowl from Kaitlin.

  “Honestly, ladies,” Jayme told them, “I am here to help. All I want to do is to find out who killed your friend.”

  Becca said, “The same person who killed those two men, right?”

  “Probably. And we will find out who that person is. Right now we’re just trying to collect more pieces to the puzzle.”

  She smiled first at Kaitlin, then at Becca. “Look, I understand how Griffin must feel. This is a very profound loss for him. For all of you. And I know he sees our questions as an invasion of his grief. I’m sorry about that. But it’s a small sacrifice, don’t you think? If we can put her killer away forever?”

  Becca said, “His name’s Connor McBride. The boy who was with us tonight.”

  “Thank you,” Jayme said. “And he’s also one of Dr. Gillespie’s students?”

  Becca nodded. “The semester before me, I think.”

  “And you all hang out together now?”

  “Not usually,” Kaitlin said. “Just tonight actually.”

  “Gotcha,” said Jayme. She cocked her head, scratched a place above her right ear. “So Griffin’s starting his senior year,” she said, thinking aloud, “as Samantha would have. And you’re a junior, right, Kaitlin?”

  Kaitlin answered with the tiniest of nods.

  “And you, Becca?”

  “I’ll be a sophomore. Same as Connor. Except that he dropped out for a couple of years and then came back.”

  “And all four of you were Gillespie’s students. Samantha makes five. Did you all get an A in his class?”

  Kaitlin said, “Becca, I have to get going. So if you want me to drop you off…”

  “I checked him out on Rate My Professor,” Jayme said. “He has an awful lot of negative reviews. What did you think of the course, Becca?”

  The young woman had been standing with her eyes down, but now, questioned directly, she quickly looked at Kaitlin. Deer in the headlights, Jayme thought.

  Kaitlin dug into her jeans pocket, pulled out her keys. “We need to go.”

  Jayme stepped between Kaitlin and Becca. “So you all took the same course but in different semesters. There are a lot of students on campus, right? How did you all get to know each other?”

  Kaitlin looked up at her. Defiant. Then said, “Some lecture or something. What’s the difference?”

  “I saw he was here tonight too,” Jayme said. “He seems to have a special relationship with you four. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Becca stared at the dirty pavement. Kaitlin looked as if she might snarl.

  Jayme said, “By the way, Kaitlin, I talked to one of your roommates earlier. She’s concerned that she hasn’t seen or heard from you in a while. You told her you were going home to be with your parents. Would you like for me to contact them for you, let them know where you’ve really been staying?”

  Kaitlin held Jayme’s gaze for three seconds. Then abruptly turned away. “I’m leaving, Becca. With or without you.” She walked away without waiting for a response.

  “I’m sorry,” Becca said, and hurried to catch up with her friend.

  Jayme watched them for a few moments, then turned and crossed half the lot to find DeMarco in his vehicle, engine running, his head laid back, eyes closed. She knocked on the hood as she passed the front of the vehicle.

  After she had climbed in and closed the door, DeMarco asked, “How’d it go?”

  “The one boy split off before I got to them. His name’s Connor McBride. He seems a couple years older than the rest of them. Griffin refused to talk to me; he split too. Kaitlin was borderline hostile. And sweet little Rebecca Sadler…we need to talk to her alone.”

  “Can do,” he said. “Learn anything else?”

  “They were all Gillespie’s students. Griffin too. And all so pretty. Even the boys. Petite, delicate features, almost like four little dark-haired dolls. Every single one of them.”

  “And Samantha Lewis makes five.”

  “What are the odds, do you think? That five of Gillespie’s students would all share those physical similarities?”

  “Are you suggesting he’s a doll collector?”

  She thought for a moment. “What’s that saying about there being something fishy in Denmark?”

  “Something rotten in Denmark,” he said.

  “Yeah. Even better.”

  Fifty-Two

  On the drive back to Pennsylvania, they shared everything they had learned and suspected from their brief interviews. Gillespie would now know that he was a subject of the investigation; if he truly had something to hide, he would be very nervous, as the students had been. They were all probably talking or texting even now.

  “Let them fret,” DeMarco said. “The more they communicate, especially by phone, the better for us.”

  “If and when we have enough information to subpoena the phone records.”

  “If and when,” he said.

  “What I can’t get a handle on is why Samantha’s friends might be involved in this. I mean, to kill her, okay, some kind of group dynamics gone haywire. But what about Brenner and Hufford? We’ve kind of lost track of them in all this.”

  DeMarco nodded. “Something’s bound to unravel. We just have to keep pulling at the one thread we have.”

  “I do feel as if we’re getting somewhere finally.”

  “Though not by leaps and bounds.”

  “When does it ever happen by leaps and bounds?”

  “In novels,” he said. “Movies. Made-up stories.” Though not in Chandler’
s novels. Not in Tom’s. And then he chuckled to himself, amused by the notion that maybe he was just a character in a Thomas Huston novel. Then that would mean that I talked with my own creator. Had lunch with him several times.

  But no, Tom was all too human. Which is to say, imperfect.

  On the other hand, he told himself, what if God is imperfect? Tom had said that a book is never as good as the writer wants it to be, because no writer possesses that level of talent. Maybe the same is true for God. All those fine ideas. All those big plans. Yet they all fell short somehow. The dinosaurs. The hominids. Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, modern humans. None of it ever quite hit the mark.

  That would explain a lot, DeMarco thought. Yep. That would explain everything.

  Fifty-Three

  They entered the house as usual, relocked the door behind them, went about their usual preparations for bed. Both seemed to have settled into solitary contemplation, though there were subjects Jayme still wanted to explore. She wanted to find out if the passing hours had helped Ryan to process his feelings regarding Lathea and her message, and how he felt about Laraine’s impromptu visit a day earlier. She wanted to tell him that she, Jayme, still felt strangely troubled that Laraine had showed up unannounced at their door, the way she might feel if she were ticketed for a traffic violation, for making a rolling stop at an intersection, for failing to yield while merging onto a busy street. It was a feeling of embarrassment for being caught, and anger at herself for thinking she could get away without consequences for breaking the rules. And, worst of all, a fear that the visit might signal Laraine’s first foray into their lives, an ambush to be followed by more guerilla attacks. Was she using their deceased child and Ryan’s guilt to insinuate herself back into his life?

  He would probably dismiss her concerns with a simple Don’t be silly. That isn’t going to happen. He was seldom willing to delve beneath the surface of a personal problem, whether hers or his own. When he grew uncomfortable with a subject, uncomfortable with his own emotions, he would make a joke. And she, most times, would let him get away with it. He preferred to sequester his feelings, except the positive ones, under lock and key. That was how he worked. How he held himself together. By relying on the comfort of old habits.

  She wondered what would become of them if he never broke from those habits. But if she pushed, might she push him away?

  They undressed and took a quick shower together, but for once he did not reach for her in the shower stall, did not stand behind her with his hands cupping her breasts and his body pressed to hers. He soaped her back, as always, and she did the same for him, but then they rinsed clean without further contact, stepped out and toweled dry.

  While she combed out her hair, he pulled on a pair of clean basketball shorts and a white V-neck T-shirt, then placed the box containing Huston’s notebooks in the middle of the bed, climbed in, and started reading. She joined him there ten minutes later, and resumed her reading as well.

  Twenty minutes passed before she spoke. “Can I read something to you?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s called ‘My Child,’” she said, and waited, half expecting that the title might change his mind about hearing it.

  “Okay,” he said without inflection.

  And so she read:

  When I first held you, the whole of your body barely covered my chest. But that was all the touch it took to make the magic work—your pure and tiny heart pressed like a kiss to the scars that covered mine, the warmth of your tender skull against my cheek. I would sit like that for hours wanting nothing more than you, needing nothing more, that small shabby room of our house underwater, all of my small life joyfully underwater with you, while the tears of the staggering truth of a love that will always be absolute and infinite washed their blessings into my skin.

  She waited for what seemed a long time, hoping that he would hear in Huston’s words and in her voice the longing she had to hold her own child to her breast. Then she asked, “Should I mark it as a keeper?”

  Another ten seconds passed before he answered. “That’s exactly how I felt when Ryan was born.”

  Only then did she realize her mistake. She had misjudged his reaction to the piece, had hoped to awaken his empathy, but had only awakened a painful memory.

  He marked the page in the composition book he had been reading and closed the cover and laid the book back into the box. “I’m too tired to read any more,” he said.

  “I’ll stop too. You want to talk?”

  “About what?” he said.

  What could she say? I want to talk about my feelings, not yours. I want you to understand how I feel. There was no way to not appear selfish.

  She closed the cover on her notebook, but instead of returning it to the box, she placed it on her end table, then switched off the light. DeMarco lifted the box off the bed and set it on the floor, then turned out the light on his bed table. He rolled over and kissed her forehead. “Good night, baby girl,” he said, then lightly kissed her cheek and her mouth before returning to his place on the bed and rolling onto his side, his back to her.

  With each of his kisses, each gentler than the previous one, her chest had ached more. But she concentrated on her breath going slowly in and out, one long, aching breath after another, and remained there on her back with her eyes on the dark ceiling for a quarter of an hour. She could hear the air conditioner humming through the ductwork behind the walls, and she could feel the cool air on her face and the warmth of DeMarco’s body next to hers and the weight of the sheet atop her knees and toes.

  Only when DeMarco’s breathing deepened and she knew that he was sleeping did she allow herself to cry.

  Fifty-Four

  They slept late the next morning, well past sunrise. When DeMarco awoke, the room was already full of light, the curtains glowing yellow. He rolled his head to the other side and saw Jayme lying there with her cell phone held aloft. “Good morning, beauty,” he said.

  “Clear and scorching today,” she told him.

  “How scorching?”

  “Ninety-one.”

  He groaned. “Better than ninety-two, I guess.” Then he asked, “How long you been awake?”

  “An hour or so. I woke up nauseous. You didn’t hear me in the bathroom?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  She laid the phone aside and rolled up against him. “I’m good. I think the salmon on my salad might have been a little off.”

  “I had the same meal.”

  “But a different piece of fish. I’m fine now, babe. What are our plans for the day?”

  “Dinner with Ben and Vee tonight. Other than that…anything you would like to do?”

  “This feels pretty good right here,” she said.

  “It does, doesn’t it? Go back to sleep if you want to.”

  “So you can slip away and go study your display wall?”

  “I’ll stay right here. Are you sure you’re not coming down with something?”

  “Yeah, the skunky salmon blues.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “Shut up and hold me awhile.”

  She would have liked to tell him about the dream that woke her an hour earlier, but felt she had to keep it to herself. In a few days the case would break open, they would identify a person of interest if not a suspect, and Brinker’s team would take over with their warrants and interrogations. Then she and DeMarco could breathe a mutual sigh of relief and focus on their own lives again. Their life together. Their future. Maybe then her troubling dreams would stop too.

  In last night’s dream she had been sitting on the sofa in the living room, nursing a baby, with the light coming full through the window, bright and warm on her shoulders and head. Then DeMarco walked in from the kitchen and looked at her darkly and said, Where did that come from? She placed a hand on the back of the tiny wa
rm head, tried to cover the entire body with her hands and arms. And DeMarco said, You need to call someone to come get that thing. He walked to the front door then and flung it open and strode out, and suddenly all the noise of the world came rushing in through the door in a black fog and filled every room with a cacophony as thick and heavy as a thunderstorm, the sounds of sirens and rumbling traffic and dogs barking and horns blaring, of someone pounding a mallet against metal and the heavy booming bass of a car stereo. She bent over her baby to cover it with her body and felt every sound pounding into her like a thousand angry fists. Worried that she was smothering the infant, she drew away to look at its lovely face, but instead saw the painted face of a porcelain doll with its skull smashed in. She awakened with a jolt and lay there gasping in bed, curled rigid and tight into herself with DeMarco’s breath slow and deep and regular beside her. Then the nausea hit and she had to scurry into the bathroom as quietly as she could.

  She knew that DeMarco would never react that way to a real baby, that he was a loving and compassionate man. She knew it but didn’t want to hear how he would respond to the dream. She didn’t want to talk about any of it or even think about it anymore, because if she did she would be sick again. So she kept quiet and laid her hand flat upon his chest and murmured contentedly as if all was right with the world.

  Fifty-Five

  The Brinkers lived in a large white colonial on a double half-acre lot on Poland Manor Road, a few miles southeast of the city. The sheriff, dressed in blue jeans and loafers and a pale-yellow knit shirt, met them on the front porch.

  “Nice crib,” DeMarco said.

  “Got it in foreclosure,” Ben told him. “Sheriff’s sale.” And gave Jayme a wink.

  She handed him a bottle of merlot. “Thank you for having us over.”

  He held the bottle by the neck and read the label. “Vee’s favorite,” he said. Then he turned and called through the screen door. “Vee! They brought wine!”