by SM Reine
“Yes,” I said. “Can I ask what all of this—”
“Where were you between five and six a.m. this morning, Mr. Shipway?” asked the female detective.
I blinked at her. Her question seemed so foreign to me. I had never in my life been questioned about my whereabouts. At least not by the cops. My ex was another matter.
I swallowed carefully. “I get up for work at six-thirty. So I was asleep—”
“Is there anyone who can verify that statement?”
“No, I live alone—”
“How long have you been divorced, Mr. Shipway?”
Now they were taking turns asking me questions. My head snapped back and forth between the two, and I suddenly found myself disoriented, even forgetting who had actually asked the questions. I found myself looking at both of them as I answered.
“I’m married. Been separated about ten months.”
“Do you have any children, Mr. Shipway?”
“No, may I ask—”
“What is your wife’s name?”
“Gerda Shipway.”
“She retained her married name?”
“Yes, as far as I’m aware.”
“Why?”
“She hated her own last name. Mostly, she hated her fa—”
“We know all that. Do you know where your wife is, Mr. Shipway?”
“No, she moved out the day after we decided to divorce. How would I know—”
“When is the last time you saw her?”
“Ten months ago. We don’t go to the same gym or anything, and she’s not my friend on Facebook, either. What’s all this about?”
They stopped their questioning for a moment. I was about to insist they tell me what the hell was going, but the woman’s face went cold. As she spoke, there was absolutely no expression in her eyes.
“Amanda Mead was found murdered this morning, stabbed to death.”
The air in the room vanished in an instant. I heard myself make a noise but I couldn’t tell you what the hell kind of noise it was. A strangled cry, I suppose. Something close to the sound a man makes when he’s told that someone he loves—loved—very dearly is dead.
No, murdered.
“You seemed surprised, Mr. Shipway.”
I couldn’t speak. I felt as if someone had hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat. The only thing that I heard coming out of my mouth were the words: “Are you sure?”
The male detective smiled but didn’t answer. He shook his head and continued adjusting his seam. If that baseball bat had actually existed, I would have shoved splinters down his throat.
“We’re quite sure, Mr. Shipway,” said the female detective. “She was murdered this morning, in her house. It was a very violent scene.”
I found myself rocking.
“We’re going to ask you again, Mr. Shipway: do you know where your wife is?”
“I assume she’s at home—”
“She’s not at her current residence and hasn’t been seen for some months.”
I stopped rocking. I looked at the female detective. “Why do you want to know about my wife?”
“She’s a person of interest. With her history...well, you understand.”
“Do you think she killed Amanda?”
“Why would you say that, Mr. Shipway?”
“You keep asking about her—”
“Did you know Amanda Mead?” This was the male detective asking the question. I think. I was still wrapping my head around Gerda’s being a person of interest. A very sick feeling overcame me and I nearly vomited. The sack of fries stank up the room with its congealing grease, and the man’s macho cologne didn’t help. Perhaps it was a good thing I hadn’t eaten lunch, after all.
“Yes,” I said. “I know her.”
They looked at me coldly, noting I’d used the present tense. When you hear of a sudden death, it takes a while before it happened in the past. And Amanda was too full of life not to imagine her walking through the door laughing, though that hadn’t happened in a long time.
“How did you know her?”
Both detectives were looking at me. My affair with Amanda hadn’t been a secret. At least, not with Amanda’s family. And, apparently, not Fullerton’s finest, either. I wondered what else they had in their files.
I wasn’t averse to lying, but I didn’t see any strategic advantage in it at the moment. “I had an affair with her.”
“For how long?”
“Nearly six months.”
“Is that why you and your wife divorced?”
I sat back in my leather chair. At least, I think it was leather. It could have been faux leather. Either way, it made rude noises as I adjusted my position. All three of us ignored the moist squeaks.
“Gerda found out about us,” I said. “And left me.”
“Did you continue seeing Amanda?”
“No.” This was incredibly hard for me to talk about, and so I paused for a moment, collected my thoughts, wondering if it was time to lie. Not yet, I decided. “She didn’t know I was married.”
“She found out you were married, then?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Gerda contacted her, told her over the phone.”
“Have you seen Amanda at all during these past, what, ten months?”
“No. She refused to answer any of my calls or to see me again.”
“Did you ever try to see her?”
“Once.”
“And what happened?”
“She got a restraining order.”
Ah, the detective would have known about the restraining order, of course, and put two and two together. They looked at each other now. Then the female detective spoke, and as she did so, emotion crossed her face for the first time. A slight quivering to her lower lip, pain in her moist eyes.
“Were you aware that Amanda recently gave birth?”
Another gut shot. This one harder. So much harder. I felt my jaw drop open. I couldn’t close it if I wanted to.
The male detective quit playing with the seam. He sat forward in his chair, which creaked under his weight. He folded his arms over my desk, and leaned his weight on his elbows. He looked me directly in the eye.
“Either you’re the world’s greatest actor, Mr. Shipway, or you really didn’t know she was pregnant.”
“But I....” I couldn’t speak.
“Of course, it could have been some other guy’s,” the jerk continued, trying to get me to crack. Maybe he thought I’d killed Amanda and this was his way of getting me to confess.
Yeah, I loved her but she screwed around on me and then I found out she had a baby and, hey, that just shoves it in your face. What’s a guy to do? Some women just need killing.
That’s the kind of thing he was hoping for, and so I gave him the opposite. Nothing. Mostly because I couldn’t feel anything but numbness.
“The baby is missing, Mr. Shipway,” he said.
I looked at the woman cop for sympathy, but her glare said maybe it should have been me that had been murdered instead of Amanda. Some men just need killing, too, maybe.
But I knew Amanda, and she was as true as a dictionary. I was the liar, the cheater, the con artist, the low-down dirty dog. And somewhere out there I had a kid.
Whom I hoped to God wouldn’t turn out like me.
“And your ex-wife is missing, too,” the male detective said, fishing a plastic baggie from his pocket. He tossed it on my desk. The baggie held a crudely sewn rag doll. It had no face, just the barest outline of a human form, but on its chest, written in dried blood, was my name: AL.
Gerda never could sew worth a damn.
“See why we’re interested?” the detective said.
5
After the world’s shittiest day at work, a day that couldn’t have ended soon enough, a day I’d lost the woman I loved forever and gained an offspring, I found myself in my garage and sitting on my still-throbbing Harley. Yes, the motorcycle was a result of a serious
mid-life crisis I had gone through. Hell, still going through. My entire life seemed like a crisis, not just the middle of it.
I finally shut off the bike and booted down the kickstand. But I just sat there straddling the ticking motor, thinking about Amanda. I could barely wrap my brain around the fact that she was dead. And it was damn near impossible for me to wrap my brain around the fact that she had a baby.
My baby.
Damn.
I’m a daddy.
And now the baby was gone. And not just gone.
Kidnapped.
And Amanda was murdered.
And my ex-wife, Gerda, was a person of interest.
Sweet Jesus. Sweet, sweet Jesus.
Yes, I had cheated with Amanda. Yes, I had single-handedly ruined my marriage, no matter if I felt justified or not. I had been a weasel and a jackass at the same time. But that didn’t mean I didn’t love Amanda.
I had loved her more than anything, and I had respected her decision to never talk to me again. The cops would never understand, and I couldn’t blame them for doubting me, but I loved her enough to let her be rid of me.
Who would do this to her? And why?
And as I sat there in my garage, with the door closed and the great machine still warm between my knees, I found myself crying in my helmet, the sound of my anguish echoing in there where my tears were safe and no one would ever see them.
When I had cried myself out, I stepped off the Harley and, still wearing the helmet, headed through the dark for the laundry room door, which was a buffer to the kitchen door.
As I reached for the laundry room doorknob, dreading the empty house that awaited me, I heard the first scraping noise.
My breath caught in my throat. My heart beat quicker, harder. Like a thrash-metal drummer on speed, careless, frantic, loud.
The noise came again, from behind me. It sounded like a dead leaf skittering over concrete, blown along by wind. Except there was no wind here in the garage.
Something bumped my foot. Actually, something ran over my boot.
I jumped backwards, gasping.
A rat? A...mouse?
I reached for the garage light switch, flicked it on. No good. The single light bulb had burned out weeks ago. I’d been meaning to change it ever since, and now I regretted my procrastination.
Cursing, I yanked open the door to the laundry and darted out of the garage, tiptoeing like a ballerina in case there were others. I slammed the door behind me, rattling the thin wall that ran between the garage and laundry room. Revulsion coursed through me. I wanted to shower.
Christ, the thing touched my boot!
I tried the door into the kitchen, but it was locked. I patted my pockets, looking for keys.
Dammit. Left them in the bike.
Out in the garage. Where the mouse was.
If it was a mouse. And since when did I have mice? I’d lived in Orange County all my life and not had any mice. But I was not going back into that garage. No, thank you.
But there was no other way out. The kitchen door was locked. So why not just flick on the light to the laundry room? Why was I here in complete darkness? The image of light washing over the small room was pleasant. Yes, then I would see that there were no other mice. Probably just the one in the garage, who might even be long gone by now.
One, however, was bad enough. My skin crawled.
Not all mice have rabies, I reminded myself. In fact, I would later learn that very few mice carried rabies. It had been a fluke that Jimmy had died. A fluke that he had been bitten by a mouse with rabies.
Except my hammering heart didn’t think it was a fluke. My hammering heart seemed to think mice with rabies was a very real possibility.
Albert, just calm down. You’re seriously overreacting. Just calm down and turn on the light. Just do that and nothing more. Baby steps, big guy.
I eased down from the single step that led up to the locked kitchen door. I knew exactly where the light switch was—at the far end of the laundry room—and roughly how many steps it would take to get there. About ten.
Ten too many.
Whoever said the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step had never walked across a mouse-infested floor.
Skiff skiff skiff.
Skee-skee.
The critter was running and squeaking at the same time, like some goddamned lunatic.
I ran forward, covering the ground quickly, and flipped on the light switch.
An instant feeling of relief came when I saw that I was indeed alone in the laundry room, that there was no squirming, shivering sea of mice just waiting to drown me with their millions of rabid bites. I was alone with the washer and dryer and a bundle of clean clothes waiting to be folded.
I still needed my keys. I had, in my sorrow, left them in the ignition of my motorcycle. And the motorcycle was parked in the center of the garage. In total darkness.
Not true. If I left the laundry door open wide, light would spill through to show the way.
I rested my head against the side door, helmet thumping dully. I did nothing but stand there and breathe. As deeply as I could.
Just as I was about to open the door, I remembered the lighter. I strode over to a shelf next to the dryer and found a lighter that was in the shape of a gun. I pulled the trigger triumphantly as a yellow flame leaped out from the narrow barrel. The flame flickered in my trembling hand. I reminded myself that I was not trapped with this mouse, that I could fix this problem by getting the keys and getting inside and calling an exterminator.
And if that failed, I’d torch the sucker.
And so I opened the door and stepped into the garage.
6
My shadow reached out before me.
I was breathing hard and quick. The inside of my helmet was a nuclear reactor threatening meltdown. Sweat poured from my brow. I stepped slowly into the garage, my heavy Caterpillar boots clopping on the concrete, although I was trying my damndest to step lightly.
All because of a single mouse.
A single mouse, however, was enough to kill Jimmy. And now it was enough to scare me sick. Such was the extent of my psychosis.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the damn lights were on, or if it were the middle of the day. In the dark, even with the faint amber glow from the laundry room, the mouse could be anywhere. And mice were shy, right? Didn’t they want to stay out of sight?
It was more afraid of me than I was of it, or so I kept telling myself.
I suddenly stopped walking, remembering the weird old lady who’d ruined my lunch hour. Such was the power of the mouse that I’d nearly forgotten both her and the cops, not to mention Amanda’s murder. And I was a daddy now, too. Afraid of a mouse. If I ever met my child, would I be able to read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie at bedtime?
A vice seemed to squeeze around my throat, cutting off my intake of air. I made a small helpless noise, the sound of a sick animal.
That weird old woman was babbling about “family.” She knew about the mouse. And maybe she knew about Amanda.
“Get a hold of yourself, Al,” I whispered inside my helmet. “This is only a coincidence.”
I was almost back to where I’d been hours ago, doubting my sanity, wondering if the alcohol had finally burned enough holes in my brain for the last of my sense to leak out.
Something click-clicked on the concrete behind me, going from the laundry room door to the boxes that lined the far wall to my left. It moved swiftly and without hesitation, as if it knew exactly where it wanted to go. And its little claws clicked a wicked staccato that made my heart pound enough to hurt my chest. I spun quickly, holding the lighter out before me. Shadows cast by the tiny flame crawled over the floor. I couldn’t see anything, at least not what I was looking for.
I turned around, my breathing loud in my helmet. I sounded like Darth Vader on helium.
And then came another sound. Another set of claws. Moving equally fast, following the first. There were two of them? Chr
ist!
I sucked air, felt dizzy, raising up on my toes again, afraid one would scamper up my leg and—
Not like Jimmy. Cut the crap.
“Hang in there, Al. Just get to your bike. Just get the keys. Just do something!”
Talking aloud made me feel a little braver, as if my words might scare off the rodents. I moved forward, quickening my pace.
“You’re doing fine,” I whispered. I held the flame out before me as if it were a crucifix, warding away vampires and other such evil spirits. It was amazing the courage a little light could give. Like maybe I was casting demons into the darkness, big, all-powerful Albert Shipway. What chance did a mouse have, even one that had crawled out of a hole in Lucifer’s Swiss cheese?
“Just get your keys and get the hell out of here. It doesn’t matter if there are ten of them”—although that was an unpleasant thought at best—“just get on your bike and get the hell out of here, and where you go doesn’t matter. Not now. Just go.”
Somewhere inside my head, a very tiny voice protested that this was only a couple of mice and that I was over-reacting. That voice was small indeed, hidden right behind the one that kept saying “You’re a poppa,” and shortly got drowned by my pounding heart and quickening breath.
Where the boxes stood, merely dark blocks now, came scratching noises. The mice were following behind me, keeping to the safety of the boxes. But nevertheless, keeping pace. Stalking me like prey.
That’s not a very pleasant thought, Al. They aren’t hunting you down. Mice don’t do that.
Sure, and they don’t kill you, either. Just ask Jimmy.
Her words came back and I could picture that wizened, witchy face: “We all have fears, Albert Shipway. You are about to meet yours.”
And here they were.
I stopped moving, frozen to the spot in the garage, the motorcycle another stride away. A feeling of complete and utter hopelessness overcame me. Something seemed to grip me by the ribcage, an icy grip that seemed to slowly crush me. It was fear. A very cold sweat broke out over my entire body. I stood alone in my garage, one hand holding a barbecue lighter in the shape of a pistol and the other hugging myself.
