Voices In The Walls: A Psychological Thriller (Michael Gresham Series)

by John Ellsworth

  "What else do I like?"

  "Men. You like lots of men."

  30

  Danny

  What does he mean I like men? We leave the restaurant and I'm still ruminating. Then we’re driving along and he’s focused on the traffic so I decide to let it pass. Of course I like men, I’m thinking. I like women, too. But I can’t drop it, I find. There was something sinister about how he said I like men.

  I'm about to ask him, when we pull into the driveway of a ranch style in Elm Corners. It sits back from the asphalt on a cul-de-sac. Front porch runs the width of the dwelling, but even this is all but hidden from the street by enormous old oak and maple trees. When I first see it, the storm windows are tightly shut against the winter freeze. The curling smoke rises over the chimney to the right. The place looks homey to me, and when we step inside through the garage, I find it's warm and cozy. Jana tells me that the decor and furniture are all of my own doing.

  "You spent a good two years making this house our home," he says. "And this place has missed you. We all missed you."

  "It's really nice."

  He sets down my small bag, then thinks better of it, and picks it up again. "Here, let me show you to your room." He turns and winks at me. "Follow me, lady."

  He leads me down a dim hallway. At the second door on the right, he turns the knob and waves me inside.

  "Voila!" he cries. "This is your old sewing room, but remember the daybed makes into a single for sleeping. You'll be very comfortable in here."

  It looks very inviting, and I spread my arms, embracing my space, then I touch his shoulder. "This already feels like my place. Could the memory be coming back already?"

  He shrugs "I don't know. Could be. I mean, I hope so. Maybe it will become even more clear the longer you're here."

  I kick off my shoes and move to the daybed, where I sit down. "This is exciting," I say, and I see that my hands are plucking at the bedcover on either side of me. "This is what I was waiting for all those months in the hospital. To come home again!"

  Jana grins and fist-pumps the air. He whoops.

  "Hey," I say, "is that the table where I had my Bernina sewing machine? It’s too small. I think I would like to replace it right away."

  "Yes, right on the table." He looks around the room, and says, "And check out the walls in here. Covered in your art quilts. Just look what you've already accomplished."

  I look around the room, and I find myself excited when I realize I have created all this art myself. "Did I ever show my work? Did I have it up for sale at a gallery?"

  "You showed your work in different studios. But I couldn't tell you where."

  "Right."

  Suddenly I am very happy. I pat the bed beside me. "Join me?"

  He sits beside me. He encircles my shoulders with his arm and pulls me close. I can feel his cheek against my cheek. He reaches across and brushes my breast with his left hand. "The men really like these."

  There it is again. The men.

  He touches me on the breast again.

  “They love these.”

  "I'm sure they do." I'm unsure what we're talking about, but he says it like I know. Evidently I was once a very different person that I am now; maybe that person will come back, I don't know.

  "So. Are you ready to get back to work?"

  I push up against him. "I'm sure I am."

  He makes drinks and we sit around our gas log, Jana in his recliner, I on my love seat. At least he says it's my love seat and, truth be told, it is definitely one I would choose again.

  "I'm so glad you're home," he says across the soft light of the fireplace. "And I'm so glad you're feeling happy about being here."

  "You've given us a very nice home and I'm so grateful to you for that." I didn't know if I had ever told him that before, if I had ever acknowledged his hard work, but I was certain I was going to now. A few months in the hospital will do that to a person.

  He pushes up from his recliner and comes over and kneels beside my love-seat. He leans into me and nuzzles the side of my face and hair with his face. I can feel his breath on my cheek. Then I feel his free hand slowly reach across my body and touch my knee. He begins lightly stroking the top of my thigh. It doesn't feel bad. It isn't in any sense an electric moment, but I'm hoping that electricity will come. I pull away from him ever so slightly, and he seems to sense that, which makes me feel safe when he lifts his hand from my thigh and withdraws it. I smile warmly, and my eyes sparkle in his direction, and he returns his hand to my thigh. Now he is stroking the inner portion, and his hand is moving up under my dress. Without knowing I'm going to do it, I push back, and push his hand away. I look at him sheepishly. His expression doesn't change: loving kindness and patience, softened in the fire light. I instantly regret that I pushed him away, and I take his hand and return it beneath my dress. He looks up at me. "Are you sure?" he says. I answer by pulling his hand up to my vagina and pressing it there. I am warm and damp and he instantly knows. "Now I remember you, Danny. You were always ready."

  We make love on the rug in front of the fireplace—he says it's a classic moment. I'm sure I don't know. But we finish and it's not at all uncomfortable, although he doesn't smell as fresh as the men I've become accustomed to around the hospital.

  While he makes another drink for himself, I retreat to the kitchen if for no other reason than to put some space between Jana and me. Swirling the ice and his highball, he steps up to the kitchen island, and says, "I think I'll let you go ahead and unpack your bag. There are three drawers in that little bureau in your sewing room, and there's plenty of room in the closet. If you run out of things to wear, your walk-in closet is still full of your stuff just off the master bedroom. So be sure and get reacquainted with your dresses and makeup."

  "Will do, Jana. Thank you."

  With that, he abruptly turns and walks away through the family room toward his office. He closes his door behind him and I'm left alone in the kitchen, trying to remember one thing I know how to cook.

  I finally give up and go back into my sewing room and shut my door. Alone on my bed, I survey the many shelves of quilting fabrics of all colors and designs that take up every square inch of shelf space in the entire room. One fabric catches my eye: a print featuring some of Chagall's iconic paintings. It occurs to me I might have liked Chagall in a prior life; evidently so, I decide, why else would I have that particular fabric?

  As I study the Chagall, it becomes clear to me that the fabric has a hillock along its surface, a raised area, as if something is hidden below. I stand and look across the darkness of the room at the doorknob. It locks. So I creep over, twist the tab, and lock it. Now I am alone. Back over to the Chagall cloth I go, and I run my hand beneath it. Which is when I feel it, a book. It feels to be about the size of an old Reader's Digest. I pull it out and have a look. Favorite Recipes, says the gold embossed cover. I flip it open to a random page. I'm thinking maybe I have stumbled onto the recipes that I like. Then I focus on the page.

  Cursive handwriting. My first thought is that it belongs to someone else. Then I reconsider and decide it is very likely my own writing from before. Since coming out of the coma, I've had to relearn printing and cursive and I frankly have no idea if what I am looking at is what came from before. I decide that it's my own writing, and I flip back to the first page and begin reading.

  Nighttime

  If you are reading this, I may or may not still be alive. My name is Dania Gresham. I am a kidnap victim. The man who kidnapped me is Jana Emerich. He also raped me one time before he kidnapped me. Now he rapes me several times a day. I have been here two days and I am swimming in his body fluids. Never in my life have I loathed another human being like this. I would stick forks in his eyes if given the chance. I would mutilate his penis with a razor blade. My only reason to keep fighting to stay alive is so I can kill him. I want to get back to my family too. But I want to kill this man even more.

  Please tell the police:

&nbs
p; 1. I am married to Michael Gresham. We have two kids, Dania and Mikey.

  2. I am a lawyer and my practice is downtown Chicago with my husband. The name of our firm is Gresham and Gresham, LLC. We limit our practice to criminal law.

  3. The man who kidnapped me is Jana Emerich. My husband defended him once on a murder case and got him off. He paid us back by raping me in my home. Then I carried his child and had a baby. He’ll never see that baby and if he finds this diary he can kill me and I still won’t let him have my son.

  4. I was staying at the Palmer House in Chicago when a man named Gunnar Mendelssohn took me to pay Jana money to leave us alone.

  So, it is my diary! It is my diary because she knows Gunnar. Nobody knows Gunnar but me.

  I close it back up and sit back. I am stunned. My real name is Dania and I am married to another man and I have two children! What in God's name? The room begins spinning around me and I feel like I'm about to flow down through a drain. I've just made love with a man not my husband, and have even enjoyed it somewhat. According to what I've previously written, I was a prisoner here, held against my will. Even worse, I was a kidnap victim!

  I force my brain into reverse. I was driving a VW, they told me. There was an accident, I was found by hunters at the bottom of the Mississippi River Bluffs, unconscious and terribly injured. A month in a coma. Then came all the rehab. I have no memory after running off the road, but now I have my own diary, written before, and there is an entire life inside, I am certain, waiting to be put on by me like a new suit of clothes.

  Then I feel the fear that has begun building in my abdomen and it works its way up into my chest like a cold hand touching my heart. I shiver violently and sit back down on the bed. I turn on my side, drawing my knees up to my chest and close my eyes. Suddenly I am missing the hospital, my old hospital room, and I want to return there. I want to escape this room that he keeps saying is mine, and flee the house and him. It is maddening not knowing for sure, but going by my diary, something is terribly wrong. My eyes close and I am shaking when I fall asleep.

  When I awake it is dark outside my window and I think I can hear the patter of rain against the glass. I sit up on the bed and feel my cheek. It is damp. Evidently I've been crying in my sleep. I immediately know I need to get my hands on a computer. The computer will let me find out all about this woman called Dania Gresham. After all, her diary said she had a husband and children and, waking up, I am certain that I have been dreaming about them and now I want more than anything to be reunited with them.

  "My name is Dania," I say to the dark ceiling. "And I want to go home." I cry myself back to sleep.

  After midnight I suddenly come awake. I sit up in bed. Voices. The voices of girls speaking a foreign language are in the walls. Coming from—I can't tell where. There is crying, too. Lots of crying. Then the voices of men, rough and angry, demanding. A little later the female voices trail off one by one until the house is still again.

  And I wonder about the walls. Wonder how voices are inside the walls of my room. I cannot sleep for hours while I shiver under my covers and try to see through the dark of the room.

  It continues several nights, the voices. Some of them I am beginning to recognize.

  Then one night I awaken and it is still and quiet. The voices are no more.

  They have not gone to a good place.

  The echoes tell me so.

  31

  Danny and Tingo

  Joseph H. Tingo was suspicious. Of anyone and everyone. So, he was a very successful detective. Everyone said so, though not many around the Alton PD actually liked him. As a detective he was thorough and patient, but as a partner he was impatient and judgmental. His partner, Frostbite Carr (named in memory of the night he fell asleep in his police car while on stakeout—when it was forty below and the engine was off), thought Joe a great guy to have on your six but a damn poor friend. Consequently, the two dicks didn't hang out together after hours. "Eight hours locked in a car with Joe is like being locked in a closet with the IRS," Frostbite confided to the other detectives of the Alton PD. "Everything and everyone is suspicious. It never gets a rest."

  Joe didn't mind. He knew what was said about him whenever he wasn't around. Water off a duck's back, Joe thought. Besides which, he couldn't really argue with his peers' appraisal. He was difficult and he was suspicious. Difficult and suspicious were two traits he wasn't ready to give up anytime soon, either. "Being difficult and being suspicious are the things that put food on our table, Betty," he told his wife at least once a week. "I'll never change." Betty would sigh and retreat even more. "I know you won't change," she would agree. "Everyone knows."

  Joe was squat and burly, bald on top with curly brown sidewalls, a sideways tilt to his stride, and stubby fingers that easily coaxed Ragtime out of the eighty-eights, especially after a whiskey or two. He looked like a friendly enough guy, which relaxed perps and witnesses, making obtaining their statements much more likely.

  One morning, he received a white business envelope, hand-lettered in a blocky first grade style, addressed to Detectives, Alton PD, and passed along to him by Lieutenant Brower, Chief of Detectives. Evidently the LT meant for Joe to follow up on the contents. Joe peered inside the envelope and pulled out a newspaper article. He blew it open for reading. The story was one that Joe hadn't seen, that ran months before, January 25. The reporter had visited Jane Doe 235 at the hospital and had taken pictures of her at the behest of the hospital and the police department. Joe studied the article, looked closely at the woman's picture, then read the article twice more. There was something about the whole thing that made Joe suspicious. Suspicious of what? Suspicious that the woman was someone he had maybe seen somewhere before? For the life of him, he couldn't remember where.

  At church? He didn't think so. Had he answered a service call at her home or where she worked? He didn't think so. Joe decided to take it up with Lieutenant Brower. He walked down the hall outside the police detectives' bullpen, and knocked on LT's doorframe. As always, the door was open and LT could be heard on the phone. "Wait one!" he called out to Joe and so Joe placed his back against the hallway wall and waited, nodding to cops and clerks as they came and went. Minutes later, he was summoned inside the LT's sanctuary.

  "Big Bad Joe!" said LT. "Get your butt in here, boy!"

  Joe stepped inside and held up the newspaper article about Jane Doe 235. "What's with this?"

  "I dunno. Someone sent it. I thought you might want to take a look."

  "Why me?"

  "Because, Detective Joe, you are one suspicious fellow and we need a one-pager from you stating that you've looked into the matter and there's nothing there. Words to that effect."

  "So this came down from the mayor or city attorney and you want me to one-page it?"

  "City attorney, I do believe. Make a couple calls, maybe run by the hospital, I don't know. But hang a page on it and close the file. Then we've done what we can if anyone ever comes around asking whether we looked into so-and-so's case. My guess is that's why the City sent it down to us. Passed the buck because they had no clue what else to do. Bastards."

  Joe decided to cut it short. This was because the LT was about to launch into one of his tirades against the city. That could go on for a good ten minutes and no one wanted an earful of that to start their day. Far be it from anyone in the know to wait around.

  "Right, LT," Joe said and slapped the doorframe on his way back out. "I'm on it!"

  Which was the moment he remembered. The stolen VW, the vehicle that he and Carr had looked into because it was involved in the accident with the unknown woman at the hospital. He checked the calendar on his smartphone. That was in March and they had gone to ask about the VW because of Jane Doe’s accident. Guy that owned it was somebody Hussell. His granddaughter drove it. Then it was stolen, recovered, and he sold it as junk because it was wrecked. It was coming together: the woman was Jane Doe 235. That was her car. He was sure of it. Now he had two pieces of info
rmation that nobody else had. He had the car—make, model, and year—and he had the woman named Jane Doe 235. They fit together, just like elbow and grease. He knew what he had to do.

  With Frostbite riding shotgun, Joe drove their unmarked car to the hospital where Jane Doe 235 was treated. They went inside, straight up to the nurses' station on the long-term-care floor.

  Joe badged the nurse who looked up when they appeared at her counter. She smiled.

  "Yes, officer?"

  "We're here about Jane Doe 235. We would like to ask a few questions about her. Is her doctor on the floor?"

  The nurse shook her head. "Actually, she's been released into her husband's custody."

  "Her husband? What's his name?"

  "I'm afraid I can't give that out."

  Joe leaned across the counter, clearly a threat.

  "Would you like to come down to the station with us while we ask you some questions? For a day or two?"

  The nurse recoiled. "One minute, please. She paged a resident physician.

  As luck would have it, he was two doors down from the nurses' station, making his morning rounds. He responded to the page.

  "Can I help?" the young doctor said from behind the threesome at the counter.

  Joe turned. "You're the treating doctor for Jane Doe 235?"

  "I was, yes."

  "We need the name of the man she was released to."

  "Sorry, officer, but that's confidential. HIPAA restrictions."

  "Law enforcement trumps HIPAA. Look it up," Joe said, presenting his badge for the doctor to examine. The doctor took the badge case in his hands and studied the badge.

  "All right. The husband went before the placement board. Nurse, look up the patient on your computer and let's give these gentlemen what they're here for. Thank you, gentlemen," said the resident, who quickly retreated back down the hall to his next patient.