Dead Memories (Carol Ann Baker Crime Book 2)

by Lissa Pelzer

  ‘Cassandra.’ Janine replied and she looked to Lauren to confirm it.

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘Here, let’s turn it up. Maybe they’ll say.’

  And the volume on the TV went up and filled the room.

  Straight away, the hyper little guy in his checked suit said, ‘And all anyone wants to talk about is... Cassandra, Cassandra, Cassandra!’

  Janine felt the pressure in her chest grow a little tighter.

  ‘But how would Janine know this girl?’ her doctor asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Lauren said. Her tone was flat and it came out kind of quick. ‘I think she’s from the South.’

  Janine nodded. ‘Right, she has a southern accent, but I’m not sure it’s real.’

  Lauren glanced back again and met her eyes, but quickly looked away and Janine went back to watching the show. Now there were people in a line-up and flashlights popping, but Cassandra had gone. Janine scanned the crowd to see if she could see her face, but she wasn’t there. And Lauren had come over to sit down next to her on the bed.

  ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she?’ Lauren said.

  Janine didn’t answer. The hospital room was going dark as if someone was turning down the dimmer switch. Something was happening inside her head.

  She could see Cassandra in an apartment now, with the Venetian blinds closed and the sun straining against them from outside. The room was hot. It smelled of kitchen cleaner and an air conditioner ran loudly. Cassandra spun around to show off the flowery dress she was wearing, but she wasn’t showing it off to her. She was showing it off to an old man in jeans and a loose white vest, and Janine felt her stomach lurch. She knew that man too. She recognized his rubbery lips and sparsely lashed eyelids. She saw his gray chest hair sticking out, thin and wiry above the vest and the skin on his neck was red like someone had thrown acid on him.

  She could smell him, cigarettes, aftershave, and an odor, while not disgusting, was just too strong to be pleasant. Janine blinked. She saw the hospital room again, but a moment later it was gone. Now, wherever she looked, she saw him and smelled him.

  ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ the old man said. ‘Come here, Pretty Girl!’ He curled his finger and Cassandra smiled.

  But it wasn’t a real smile. Cassandra went over to him. She stood about a foot away from the old man and stayed there like she had been frozen.

  ‘I said, come here,’ the old man said, and his tongue came out and licked his cracked lips.

  ‘Where’s here?’ Cassandra said with a tight smile.

  The man reached out and offered her his hand.

  Janine heard her own voice saying, ‘Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Fuck this, Cassandra. Let’s go home.’ But she wasn’t talking and she knew, she had never said those words, only ever thought them.

  Cassandra went to him. She lifted up the bottom of her dress, turned around and sat down on the old man’s knee. She was just sitting there, but he was murmuring and started to purr like a cat.

  ‘May I do something lovely?’ he asked.

  And Cassandra had looked at her, rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘Okay,’ she said.

  The old man bent his arm up and Janine saw Cassandra rise a little.

  ‘Lucky me,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of men who would pay good money to be able to do this.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should introduce us, then.’ And Cassandra, the same one from the TV began to laugh.

  Her therapist had spoken of jigsaws. She said, when her memories started coming back, it would be like turning over pieces of the puzzle. But that wasn’t the sensation she’d experienced just now. It was more like a lightning strike on a dark night. She was standing there on a mountainside, watching everything in front of her light up. For the briefest second, she could see all the features of the landscape. But it was all two-dimensional. And the picture disappeared too soon for her to really make any sense of it.

  Red Rider

  In the backyard of his house in Elk Grove, Red flipped burgers while his wife entertained their guests. To be more accurate, Red cooked dinner while his wife got drunk with a couple of guys from her ex’s bowling league, who he’d never laid eyes on in the eight years they’d been married. But they didn’t bother him, not yet at least. What bothered him was his wife’s new hairstyle.

  This time last month, her hair had been over her shoulders, streaked blonde and pretty nice. Last week, she’d cut it all off and gone auburn and it had aged her badly. Red could probably handle a change of appearance if nothing else came with it, but her fresh look had come hand in hand with this flirty, new behavior. Inviting guys around that he didn’t know, he didn’t get why she had done that. And what else? She had left a can of paint open in the garage and when he came home the other day, he’d driven right over it and gotten white emulsion all over his tires.

  ‘White walls!’ she had said. ‘They’re cool again, you know!’

  Red had laughed it off, but in the back of his mind he worked it out. She hadn’t been painting anything. She had put that can of paint out there on purpose.

  Red pressed the burger to the grill and let it sizzle and flame.

  There was a laugh from one of the guys, and his wife turned her face up to Red and said, ‘Jeff and I go way back.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  And he saw her wink at his guy. Jeff looked sheepish. And sure, Red felt pretty rough straight away. Strike one for today, but maybe five or six since he’d come home. He didn’t say anything. He’d learned if a woman wanted to send your blood pressure up, it was best just to let her try until she got tired of it. But she hadn’t gotten tired of it yet.

  ‘How long has it been?’ she asked Jeff.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Must be twenty years.’

  ‘Twenty years!’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Me neither, sometimes.’

  ‘We sure were cute back then!’

  And Red felt Jeff’s eyes skirt past him. He felt the other guy decide not to answer. Good work, Jeff.

  ‘And what about us, Tommy, we’ve had our times too, huh?’

  Now it was Tommy’s turn to get a bit shy, but he chose a different way out, probably the wrong way.

  Tommy said, ‘I used to be over at yours all day, every day when you guys lived up in Pasadena. Sleeping in the den when we’d had one too many. You guys took real good care of me after Joan left.’

  His wife cut in, ‘You mean me and Reggie!’ And she gave a laugh. ‘Reggie, Red! I know it’s hard to get those names straight sometimes.’ She looked at Red. ‘But we get mixed up too sometimes, huh, Red?’

  ‘Oh, you call him Reggie sometimes?’ Jeff asked.

  ‘Nope,’ his wife said.

  Strike two.

  ‘I get it.’ He wagged his finger. ‘Well, Red it can’t be helped. These times we’re living in, they aren’t biblical, no matter how many folk wished they were. We get names mixed up.’

  Red smiled. His wife narrowed her eyes at him.

  ‘Can I get anyone another beer?’ Red asked.

  ‘I’ll take one.’

  Red threw a can of Blue Moon to Tommy who caught it underhand. He thought that might have broken her line of thought, but his wife was just getting started. She shuffled her shoulders like a cat getting ready to pounce. Red knew what to expect.

  ‘You know what he calls me, instead of my name?’ she said finally. ‘He calls me, Wife.’

  ‘That’s because you are my wife!’ Red pushed out a chuckle and clicked the tongs together. What the heck did she think she was doing? She knew darn well, this subject was off limits.

  ‘Sure I am, but I have a name, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘So why don’t you call me by it?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to, not all the time.’

  ‘Not ever.’ And she reached across the table to where Jeff’s cigarettes lay. Red’s wife took one without asking and Jeff didn’t
seem to mind. ‘I’ll tell you something. He calls me Wife because he can’t ever remember my name. He tries, but it takes him about half an hour to work through all of the hussies he was with before me.’

  Tommy said, ‘Red, you old dog!’

  Red didn’t look at him.

  ‘But I don’t know why I care!’ she said. ‘Half the time, he can’t even get his own name right!’

  And Jeff stepped in this time. ‘Aw. Come on now!’

  ‘No, I’m serious. Too much good living out wherever he came from addled his head.’

  ‘I’m not buying that Red forgets his name is Red.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean his real name, not his trucker name, or what passes for his real name.’

  ‘What is your real name?’ Jeff asked.

  Red rubbed the back of his neck.

  ‘See, he doesn’t know.’

  And for a moment, Red wanted to reach across the table and pummel her. He closed his eyes and prayed silently for something to happen, to take him out of this situation. Then he straightened his cap and said, ‘The name’s Ralph Adams.’

  And for a moment, Red thought they were done, but she started up again.

  ‘You know, on our marriage license, he wrote Thomas instead of Ralph on the scrap of paper. I hardly noticed before the woman had copied it and we had to start over with a fresh sheet.’

  Someone laughed, but Red knew it was just for show. The two guys didn’t want to follow this route any more than he did. But then it went quiet, so he had to say something.

  ‘Thomas was my father. I used to fill out stuff for him all the time.’ Which was the truth. His father had been called Thomas.

  ‘But I’m guessing, his last name would have been Adams too.’

  Just then, the phone in the kitchen rang. Usually, his wife would go and get it, but Red had prayed for it, so he got up, went through and heard the slap of the screen door a couple of seconds later. He picked it up.

  ‘Hel-lo…’

  It was his firm on the other end. The woman started talking about routes and schedule changes for the coming month, while he moved the blinds so he could keep an eye on his wife. But with him gone, she seemed to have settled down. No show without an audience and Red started to fan through the opened mail piled up on the side.

  ‘We’re looking to swap some routes around. I hope you don’t think the Ontario line is jinxed. Not after getting pulled over up there and then your Freightliner giving up when there wasn’t even anything wrong with it...’

  He knew this woman’s voice and knew what she looked like, but wouldn’t have been able to put a name to her either. He’d never been very good at remembering women’s names. He always preferred to give them the nicknames that suited them. That seemed to make it easier. He’d known a ‘Sunshine’, a ‘Bubble Butt’ and a ‘Rosy’ in his time. It was just a shame he couldn’t think of anything nicer for his wife than Wife.

  ‘...Because we need to send you back up that way. It’s the Texas rerouting that’s messing up the schedule. This is a new contract and we really want to take care of these guys…’

  Red turned over an empty envelope. His wife liked opening letters but never seemed to want to do anything with them once she had done so.

  ‘What in the world?’

  He had a store card invoice in his hand for nearly $10,000 and listed in the items where cushions, throws and lampshades.

  ‘Excuse me?’ the woman on the other end said.

  ‘Oh nothing, Honey. Go on.’

  Red pulled on the super long cord, stepped around the kitchen island and went towards the couch layered with cushions and blankets. His wife had said they had come out of storage, but this junk smelled new. It smelled like a J.C Penney’s. Was he looking at $10,000 worth of new soft furnishings?

  As if she had heard his thoughts, the screen door swung open and in she came. He had noticed yesterday that her pants had gotten tighter, but now he really noticed it. He could see the cellulite through the fabric. Her ass looked like an old VW Beetle after a severe hailstorm. She reached up for a glass out of the cupboard and saw him looking at it.

  ‘You like them?’ she asked. ‘Ashley next door has the same pair. She thought she was something special, but I got the identical ones.’ She began to laugh. ‘Guess I showed her!’

  And she took the ketchup off the counter, tucked in under her arm, turned around and went back outside. Red felt the frown forming on his forehead. It deepened so that he could see his own eyebrows.

  What was going on? First, his Freightliner had messed him around when that guy, Jerrod, couldn’t find a problem with it, and now his wife was running amok. Was he being punished for something he had done wrong?

  ‘So did you hear me okay?’ the voice down the line said. ‘I’m taking you off the Dallas route and putting you back on the Ontario one. You know those guys up there. They like you.’

  Red rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Come again?’

  ‘Can you leave tomorrow morning?’

  ‘To go up north?’

  ‘I know it’s short notice. You been drinking today?’

  Red looked at the can in his hand. He reached out across the sink and poured it out.

  ‘No. I’m good. I’ll see you in the yard.’ And he headed back out to his inherited friends.

  ‘Who was that? Another one of your women?’ his wife asked.

  ‘Nope. That was the firm. I’m back on the road tomorrow.’

  Three faces stared up at him from their chairs. None of them seemed too concerned.

  ‘That means, for me at least, the drinking stops now and I need to go pack and get some sleep, but you guys are welcome to carry on.’

  His wife snorted at his assumption that he had any right to say who partied at his house. Just because he paid the bills, didn’t make him God.

  If Red had been a swearing man, he might have done so. But he never took the Lord’s name in vain. So his wife had started sleeping around behind his back, started eating more than she needed, started coveting her neighbor’s possessions, getting proud and getting cocky. Message received, loud and clear.

  The screen door shut and Red went through to the bedroom, lay down and looked up at the ceiling. A few minutes later, he heard the radio coming on and his wife laughing.

  Didn’t matter. His prayers had been answered. He didn’t know why yet, didn’t know what the Lord expected him to do, but he was going to go back up to Indiana to find out. He was going to go and see Carol Ann Baker or Janine Kenny and then hopefully, his life and his wife would get back to usual.

  Janine

  They’d moved her to somewhere they called a mental health rehabilitation unit and she had the distinct feeling that she’d come down in the world. It was basically, a fancy jail, a corridor of closed doors and behind each one someone who wasn’t allowed out into the big, bad world on their own. She saw their faces, withdrawn and scared as they were ushered in and out of their cells. In the hospital, she’d had the feeling of being protected from the outside world, but here it was as if the outside world was being protected from her.

  Alongside the new accommodation, she had a new therapist, a man named Karl who did a forty-five-minute timeslot with her twice a week and drew anime characters on his pad while they talked. Her caseworker, Bryan came once a week too and Lauren had come over on three different evenings, seemingly just to hang out.

  The first time Lauren came by, she dyed Janine’s hair, saying her roots were coming through. The next time, she cut it short again so it looked like it did on her ID. The third time, she promised to take her to the mall and buy her some new clothes. Janine didn’t want to have her hair dyed. She didn’t want it cut either. And although she did want to get out of here, she had the feeling that the mall was not where she wanted to go. But Lauren was easy to talk to. She told stories about people Janine had never heard of, and because she didn’t know them, she didn’t have to reply or give her opinion back.

&n
bsp; Lauren told her one story about how her sister always painted every nail on her hand a different color because one time, she’d gone to a theme park like that and everyone had told her how great it was. Apparently, her sister had never worked out it was Pride Night. Lauren had never told her either, and had just let her go around with rainbow nails ever since.

  She told her other stories too. Like how there was this crazy family in town who couldn’t stop shooting each other. The first time was when the grandma was chasing a rat and accidentally shot her own foot as it ran over her. The second time, one of the brothers threatened to shoot the other and then did shoot him when he tried to put the safety back on. The grandfather shot himself when the grandma died. Then the father shot his wife, their cousin and then himself on purpose because someone was sleeping with someone, Janine wasn’t sure who, and now the whole family was banned from owning guns.

  ‘And a girlfriend of mine went out with one that just got shot. She says, one time, he put a gun in her hand and held it up to his own head and said he was going to shoot himself and she’d get the electric chair!’

  Which apparently was just doubly stupid, because they hadn’t used the electric chair in Indiana since 1995. On and on she went.

  Listening to Lauren talk was like watching soaps without the annoying music. Her big, arching storylines went off on tangents that could last for minutes at a time. But Janine liked to listen to these stories, and alone in her bed at night, she replayed them and imagined them over and over again.

  Because what else was she meant to do after lights out? She didn’t have any memories of her own.

  Bryan

  They were seated in a therapy room, Janine on one side facing the window with him on the other facing the door. He had laid her thick, blue folder on the table between them, making a big show of it. It was a trust action to let her know he didn’t own her information. She wasn’t a prisoner. That said, Bryan knew, if she reached for it, he would make a grab for it first.

  He said, ‘You know I called your old home to see if anyone there knew Cassandra Stephenson, the girl from TV and that no one did?’ He pulled the file towards him to take out a slip of paper. ‘Well, the story doesn’t end there. I managed through some connections, to get ahold of her agent.’ He paused and looked up to meet her eyes, but Janine was just picking at her black nail tips. Her nails were always freshly painted, either black or purple. He had the feeling Lauren, the candy striper, regularly painted them for her and that Janine spent half of the next day, picking the color away again.